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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
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Oliver Wendell Holmes was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. A member of the Fireside Poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the best writers of the day. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table . He was also an important medical reformer. In addition to his work as an author and poet, Holmes also served as a physician, professor, lecturer and inventor and, although he never practiced it, he received formal training in law.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holmes was educated at Phillips Academy and Harvard College. After graduating from Harvard in 1829, he briefly studied law before turning to the medical profession. He began writing poetry at an early age; one of his most famous works, "Old Ironsides", was published in 1830 and was influential in the eventual preservation of the USS Constitution. Following training at the prestigious medical schools of Paris, Holmes was granted his Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School in 1836. He taught at Dartmouth Medical School before returning to teach at Harvard and, for a time, served as dean there. During his long professorship, he became an advocate for various medical reforms and notably posited the controversial idea that doctors were capable of carrying puerperal fever from patient to patient. Holmes retired from Harvard in 1882 and continued writing poetry, novels and essays until his death in 1894.

Surrounded by Boston's literary elite—which included friends such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell—Holmes made an indelible imprint on the literary world of the 19th century. Many of his works were published in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that he named. For his literary achievements and other accomplishments, he was awarded numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. Holmes's writing often commemorated his native Boston area, and much of it was meant to be humorous or conversational. Some of his medical writings, notably his 1843 essay regarding the contagiousness of puerperal fever, were considered innovative for their time. He was often called upon to issue occasional poetry, or poems written specifically for an event, including many occasions at Harvard. Holmes also popularized several terms, including Boston Brahmin and anesthesia. He was the father of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. August 1809 – 7. October 1894
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes: 135 quotes11 likes

Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

“What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything else;—long arguments on special points between people who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain ultimata [finalities] of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood is the sacrifice.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

'Scholastic and Bedside Teaching', Introductory Lecture to the Medical Class of Harvard University (6 Nov 1867). In Medical Essays 1842-1882 (1891), 302.

“I don't want to have the territory of a man's mind fenced in. I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars and the awful hollow that holds them. We have done with those hypaethral temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can have attics and skylights to them. Minds with skylights…
One-story intellects, two-story intellects, three-story intellects, with skylights. All fact-collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class. Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so that he can get at them,—facts below, principles above, and all in ordered series; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture in the attics.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

“So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor man's necessities.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842)

“Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“God reigneth. All is well.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Hymn at the Funeral Services of Charles Sumner; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare Browning, Pippa Passes: "God's in his heaven— All's right with the world".

“One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“Little I ask, my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A very plain brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own;—
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Contentment".
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“If we are only as the potter's clay
Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,
And broken into shards if we offend
The eye of Him who made us, it is well.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“It went to pieces all at once—
All at once and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“You think they are crusaders sent
From some infernal clime,
To pluck the eyes of sentiment
And dock the tail of Rhyme,
To crack the voice of Melody
And break the legs of Time.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

“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)

“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).

“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.

“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).

“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)

“You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“Most persons have died before they expire, — died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“His home! the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it;
This little speck, the British Isles?
’T is but a freckle,—never mind it.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“O hearts that break and give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends,

From the same cradle's side,
From the same mother's knee,
—One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The Two Streams", Ch. VI.
The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)

“When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“"I suppose you are an entomologist?"
"Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name. No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp".”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

“All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

“The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“You hear that boy laughing?—you think he’s all fun;
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day?”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

“The brightest blades grow dim with rust,
The fairest meadow white with snow.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Chanson without Music; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

No Time like the old Time; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,— give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“What a miserable thing it is to be poor.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

“Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)