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Authors & Writing
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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 out of wood, you must make it out of words.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872
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Committee
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I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Conversation
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Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Doubt
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"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes
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Hope
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"Beware how you take away hope from another human being."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Ideas
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"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, 1853
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There never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Knowledge
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This is an inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling up beyond a certain height knowledge which is in itself mere trash and lumber to a man whose life is to be one long fight with death and disease, there will be some sharp questions asked by and by.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Scholastic and Bedside Teaching. [Lecture given to the medical class of Harvard University]. [Reprinted in Medical Essays by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Birmingham, AL: Classics of Medicine Library; 1987, p. 291], November 6, 1867
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Life
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On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Mother
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"Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother's secret hope outlives them all."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Personality
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"It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames... We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guardian Angel
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Remembrance
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Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death--of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Silence
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And Silence, like a poultice, comes
To heal the blows of sound.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Truth
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"Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Words
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A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Books by and about Oliver Wendell Holmes
