Oliver Wendell Holmes: Trending quotes

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Oliver Wendell Holmes: 270 quotes11 likes

“Thou say’st an undisputed thing
In such a solemn way.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Josephus Daniels, ambassador to Mexico, sent this quotation to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 1, 1936, in a note of New Year greetings, with this comment: "Here is an expression from Holmes which, if it has missed you, is so good you may find a use for it in one of your 'fireside' talks". Reported in Carroll Kilpatrick, ed., Roosevelt and Daniels (1952), p. 159.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“The great delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and according to law.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“Mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Holmes' critique of "single file" thinking foreshadows Fyodor Dostoevsky's attack, in an essay of October 1876, on what he called "the straight-line approach". See Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, Volume 1: 1873–1876 (Northwestern University Press, 1997), pp. 641–57, 721–29.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
O love Divine, forever dear:
Content to suffer, while we know,
Living and dying, Thou art near!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 596.

“Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“The hat is the ultimum moriens of "respectability."”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Ultimum moriens," the Autocrat explains, "is old Italian [i.e. Latin], and signifies last thing to die."
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your opinion really want your praise, and will be contented with nothing less.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

On the Seventieth Birthday of Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1899); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. I.

“Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words…”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Source: The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872), p. 266 The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. 3 (1892)

“But Memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A good Time going; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“Where go the poet's lines?
Answer, ye evening tapers!
Ye auburn locks, ye golden curls,
Speak from your folded papers!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,—'atheists,' heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just like other folks.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

“The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. XI.

“I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)