OWOliver Wendell Holmes

148 collected words

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Born 1809 AD; death year unknown

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.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1809 AD

Call him not old, whose visionary brain Holds o'er the past its undivided reign, For him in vain the envious seasons roll Who bears eternal summer in his soul. If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay, Spring with her birds, or children at their play, Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art, Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart, Turn to the record where his years are told,— Count his gray hairs,—they cannot make him old!

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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02c. 1809 AD

A mind stretched by a new ideanever shrinks back to its original proportions. ~

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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03c. 1809 AD

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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04c. 1809 AD

You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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05c. 1809 AD

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

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06c. 1809 AD

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility I think 'whatsoever thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might ' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbour as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbour you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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07c. 1809 AD

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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08c. 1809 AD

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: "The work is done."

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09c. 1809 AD

An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

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10c. 1809 AD

A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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11c. 1809 AD

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

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12c. 1809 AD

Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.

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13c. 1809 AD

The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.

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14c. 1809 AD

If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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15c. 1809 AD

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

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16c. 1809 AD

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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17c. 1809 AD

If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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18c. 1809 AD

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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19c. 1809 AD

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

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20c. 1809 AD

rouble creates a capacity to handle it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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21c. 1809 AD

What a blessed thing it is that nature when she invented manufactured and patented her audiors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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22c. 1809 AD

Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

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23c. 1809 AD

Most persons have died before they expired - died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote

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24c. 1809 AD

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

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