Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894): American poet and physician. The library holds 109 quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, The Last Leaf, A Rhymed Lesson. Urania and other works. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels
When the tired player shuffles off the buskin;
A page of Hood may do a fellow good
After a scolding from Carlyle or Ruskin.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else; very rarely to those who say to themselves, “Go to now, let us be a celebrated individual.”
Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The angel of life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of the resurrection.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber if he has common-sense on the ground-floor. But if a man has not got plenty of good common-sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.
In his own verse the poet still we find.
In his own page his memory lives enshrined.
As in their amber sweets the smothered bees,—As the fair cedar, fallen before the breeze,
Lies self-embalmed amidst the mouldering trees.
We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth’s dull mist the coming of the dawn,—Who see in twilight’s gloom the first pale spark,
While others only note that day is gone.
You think they are crusaders sent
From some infernal clime,
To pluck the eyes of sentiment
And dock the tail of Rhyme,
To crack the voice of Melody
And break the legs of Time.
You hear that boy laughing?—you think he’s all fun;
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
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.
An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody’s use, and glorify them by his handling.
One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own.
Men are tatooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea islanders; but a real human heart, with divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes.