The voices / 148 fragments

Oliver Wendell Holmes

1809 AD — Undated

Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.

Author and source reference ↗

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Historical source references

Old Ironsides
The Cambridge Churchyard
The Last Leaf
To an Insect
The Music-Grinders
The Height of the Ridiculous
The Last Reader
Poetry, a Metrical Essay
A Sentiment
A Rhymed Lesson
Lines by a Clerk
The Poet's Lot
The Voiceless
The Chambered Nautilus
A Good Time going
The Boys
How not to settle it
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
On the Seventieth Birthday of Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1889)
Quote1550 · printed citation: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: A Rhymed Lesson, Line 229
Quote649 · printed citation: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: The Dilemma
Complete signed selection 8; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1901
Complete signed selection 176; printed byline: Holmes; New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1901
Complete signed selection 346; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1901
Complete signed selection 413; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1901
Complete signed selection 543; printed byline: Holmes; New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1901
Complete signed selection 29; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907
Complete signed selection 57; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907
Complete signed selection 195; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907
Complete signed selection 289; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907

Archive entries

01c. 1809 AD

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

02c. 1809 AD

Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

03c. 1809 AD

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

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04c. 1809 AD

There is that glorious epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the historian, in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men: "Good Americans when they die go to Paris."

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

05c. 1809 AD

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

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06c. 1809 AD

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

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07c. 1809 AD

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

08c. 1809 AD

Knowledge and timber should n't be much used till they are seasoned.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

09c. 1809 AD

The hat is the ultimum moriens of respectability.

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10c. 1809 AD

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

11Undated

The Sabbath brings its kind release, And Care lies slumbering on the lap of Peace.

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12Undated

The bright black eye, the melting blue,— I cannot choose between the two.

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13Undated

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

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14Undated

When you find a person a little better than his word, a little more liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in his statements by facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a kind of eloquence in that person’s utterance not laid down in Blair or Campbell.

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15Undated

Be firm: one certain element in luck Is genuine, solid old Teutonic pluck.

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16Undated

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

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17Undated

The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

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18Undated

If your name is to live at all, it is so much more to have it live in people's hearts than only in their brains! I don't know that one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of logarithms, but a song of Burns or a hymn of Charles Wesley goes straight to your heart and you can't help loving both of them, the sinner as well as the saint.

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19Undated

George Washington. Born 1732. Welcome to the day returning, Dearer still as ages flow, While the torch of faith is burning, Long as Freedom's altars glow! See the hero whom it gave us Slumbering on a mother's breast; For the arm he stretched to save us, Be its morn forever blest.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

20Undated

Those homelier wildflowers, which we call weeds; yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions, lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame one after another; the red and white clovers; the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,—"the white man's foot," as the Indians called it;—those common growths which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget, each of them is a ray of the divine beauty.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

21Undated

I come under your windows, some fine morning, and play you one of my adagio movements, and some of you say,—This is good, play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did not change the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust in another. How easily this or that tune flows! you say, there must be no end of such melodies in him. I will open the poor machine for you one moment, and you shall look. Every note marks where a spur of steel has been driven in. It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make it was the painful task of time.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

22Undated

Thou wilt not hold in scorn the child who dares Look up to Thee, the Father,—dares to ask More than Thy wisdom answers. From Thy hand The worlds were cast; yet every leaflet claims From that same hand its little shining sphere Of star-lit dew; thine image, the great sun, Girt with his mantle of tempestuous flame, Glares in mid-heaven; but to his noontide blaze The slender violet lifts its lidless eye, And from his splendor steals its fairest hue, Its sweetest perfume from the scorching fire.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

23Undated

I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births,—with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

24Undated

The snow has capped yon distant hill, At morn the running brook was still, From driven herds the clouds that rise Are like the smoke of sacrifice; Ere long the frozen sod shall mark The ploughshare, changed to stubborn rock. The brawling stream shall soon be done— Sing, little bird! the frosts have come.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote