Oliver Wendell Holmes: Call

Oliver Wendell Holmes was Poet, essayist, physician. Explore interesting quotes on call.
Oliver Wendell Holmes: 270   quotes 11   likes

“Call him not old whose visionary brain
Holds o’er the post its undivided reign”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The Old Player" (1861), in Songs in Many Keys (1862).
Context: Call him not old whose visionary brain
Holds o’er the post its undivided reign,
For him in vain the envious seasons roll,
Who bears eternal summer in this soul.

“Knowledge—it excites prejudices to call it science—is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872), p. 267 The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. 3 (1892)

Knowledge , Science

“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)

“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)

“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.

“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)

Sun

“"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)

Intelligence

“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).

Children , Angels , Boy , Thinking

“We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

Spring , Forgetting

“All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.””

Oliver Wendell Holmes

They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)