“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the closer it contracts.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" in The New England Magazine, Vol. 1 (1831), p. 431.
Misattributed

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 "The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the closer it contracts." by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 107
United States Supreme Court justice 1841–1935

Related quotes

Thomas Moore photo

“The minds of some of our statesmen, like the pupil of the human eye, contract themselves the more, the stronger light there is shed upon them.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Preface to Corruption and Intolerance.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Steven Erikson photo
Ogden Nash photo
William Cowper photo

“Oh! for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heav'nly frame;
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb!”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

No. 1, "Walking With God".
Olney Hymns (1779)

Alafair Burke photo

“Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” More like pour some penicillin”

Alafair Burke (1969) American novelist and legal scholar

All Day and a Night

Charles Bukowski photo

“Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful
fight.

Still
is.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“Those are the lights on the head of death. Death puts them on like a hat and then shoots off on a gallop, gaining on us, getting closer and closer. Sometimes it turns off its lights. But death never stops.”

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from A Separate Reality (Chapter 6)

Ivan Illich photo

“Pupil, puppet, person, eye. It is not my mirror.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

We the People interview (1996)
Context: I want to just go back to a great rabbinical and also, as you see, monastic, Christian development beyond what the Greeks like Plato or Cicero already knew about friendship. That it is from your eye that I find myself. There's a little thing there. They called it pupilla, a "puppet" of myself which I can see in your eye. The black thing in your eye.
Pupil, puppet, person, eye. It is not my mirror. It is you making me the gift of that which Ivan is for you. That's the one who says "I" here. I'm purposely not saying, this is my person, this is my individuality, this is my ego. No. I'm saying this is the one who answers you here, whom you have given to him.

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“The instruction booklet for Stargate, a contemporary symbolic game relating to consciousness, opens: The turning about is upon us, the turning of mind, the expansion of eyes... the light that shapes from within.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eleven, Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

Related topics