Oliver Wendell Holmes: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Then the white man hates him [the Native American], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The Pilgrims of Plymouth" http://www.unz.org/Pub/BrainerdCephas-1901v02-00267 (Oration, December 22, 1855), in Cephas Brainerd and Eveline Warner Brainerd (eds), The New England Society Orations: Volume II. New York: The Century Co., 1901, p. 298.

God , Hate

“And silence, like a poultice, comes
To heal the blows of sound.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

To an Insect; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Silence

“One unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above;
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it—God is love.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

What we all think; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare Browning, Paracelsus: "God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that".

Love , God , Fear , Reading

“I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped straggling letters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.””

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Mechanism in thought and morals https://books.google.se/books?id=c5rOGqwLGaEC&lpg=PA47 : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 29, 1870
Mechanism in thought and morals (1871)

Children , Truth , Smile , Music

“Grant us Thy truth to make us free,
And kindling hearts that burn for Thee,
Till all Thy living altars claim
One holy light, one heavenly flame.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Lord Of All Being" (1848).

Truth , Light , Heart

“How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies?”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Earlier in the chapter Holmes says that all the comparisons and analogies ever made "would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies that rolls through the universe".
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Universe

“All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Death

“I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The last Leaf; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Speak not too well of one who scarce will know
Himself transfigured in its roseate glow;
Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true,
Remembering always he belongs to you;
Deal with him as a truant, if you will,
But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Poem", read at a dinner given for the author by the medical profession of the City of New York (April 12, 1883); reported in The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, ed. Eleanor M. Tilton (1895, rev. 1975), p. 71.