“Beware how you take away hope from any human being.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Valedictory Address to medical graduates at Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158; this has also been paraphrased "Beware how you take away hope from another human being".
Misattributed
Context: You can never be too cautious in your prognosis, in the view of the great uncertainty of the course of any disease not long watched, and the many unexpected turns it may take.
I think I am not the first to utter the following caution : —
Beware how you take away hope from any human being. Nothing is clearer than that the merciful Creator intends to blind most people as they pass down into the dark valley. Without very good reasons, temporal or spiritual, we should not interfere with his kind arrangements. It is the height of cruelty and the extreme of impertinence to tell your patient he must die, except you are sure that he wishes to know it, or that there is some particular cause for his knowing it. I should be especially unwilling to tell a child that it could not recover; if the theologians think it necessary, let them take the responsibility. God leads it by the hand to the edge of the precipice in happy unconsciousness, and I would not open its eyes to what he wisely conceals.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Beware how you take away hope from any human being." by Oliver Wendell Holmes?

Oliver Wendell Holmes 135

Poet, essayist, physician 1809–1894

Related quotes

“Beware how you take away hope from any human being.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in his valedictory address to medical graduates at Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158; this has also been paraphrased "Beware how you take away hope from another human being".
Misattributed

“how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

65
XAIPE (1950)

“There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Source: Selected Poems

“But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers [by Huawei], foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition, p. 148
No Place to Hide (2014)

“Loving—if the answering breast
Seem not to be thus possessed,
Still in hoping have a care;
If it do, beware, beware!
But if in yourself you find it,
Above all things—mind it, mind it!”

Arthur Hugh Clough Love, not Duty

Love, Not Duty, st. 5.

“Art’s true purpose is to be human as opposed to some rarefied activity set away from real life. I think art should help you to navigate the real challenges of being a human being.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

Quoted in the documentary The Question Mark Inside broadcast in the UK by Sky Arts (30 October 2009).

“You've gotten so caught up in being alone that you're afraid of what might happen if you actually find someone else that can take you away from it.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

“People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

“No matter how bad the wicked world has hurt you, in the long run, there is something gained, and it is all for the best … The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

"Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) also quoted in Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (2004) by Ed Cray
Context: No matter how bad the wicked world has hurt you, in the long run, there is something gained, and it is all for the best … The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine, and any song that says, the pleasures I have seen in all of my trouble, are the things I never can get — don't worry — the human race will sing this way as long as there is a human to race.
The human race is a pretty old place.

“All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?”

Anthony Horowitz (1955) English novelist and screenwriter

Source: Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin

“Beware how you take away hope from any human being.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Oliver Wendell Holmes 135

Related quotes

Related topics