Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it— but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (29 August 1809 – 8 October 1894) was an American physician, writer, poet, and the father of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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• The god looked out upon the troubled deep
  Waked into tumult from its placid sleep;
  The flame of anger kindles in his eye
  As the wild waves ascend the lowering sky;
  He lifts his head above their awful height
  And to the distant fleet directs his sight.
  • "Translation From The Æneid, Book I" written while at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts (c. 1824)

• Lord of all being, thronèd afar,
  Thy glory flames from sun and star;
  Center and soul of every sphere,
  Yet to each loving heart how near!
  Sun of our life, Thy quickening ray,
  Sheds on our path the glow of day;
  Star of our hope, Thy softened light
  Cheers the long watches of the night.
  • "Lord Of All Being" (1848)

• Grant us Thy truth to make us free,
  And kindling hearts that burn for Thee,
  Till all Thy living altars claim
  One holy light, one heavenly flame.
  • "Lord Of All Being" (1848)

• You can never be too cautious in your prognosis, in the view of the great uncertainty of the course of any disease not long watched, and the many unexpected turns it may take.
  I think I am not the first to utter the following caution : —
  Beware how you take away hope from any human being. Nothing is clearer than that the merciful Creator intends to blind most people as they pass down into the dark valley. Without very good reasons, temporal or spiritual, we should not interfere with his kind arrangements. It is the height of cruelty and the extreme of impertinence to tell your patient he must die, except you are sure that he wishes to know it, or that there is some particular cause for his knowing it. I should be especially unwilling to tell a child that it could not recover; if the theologians think it necessary, let them take the responsibility. God leads it by the hand to the edge of the precipice in happy unconsciousness, and I would not open its eyes to what he wisely conceals.
  • Valedictory Address to medical graduates at Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158; this has also been paraphrased "Beware how you take away hope from another human being."

• Call him not old whose visionary brain
  Holds o’er the post its undivided reign,
  For him in vain the envious seasons roll,
  Who bears eternal summer in this soul.
  • "The Old Player" (1861), in Songs in Many Keys (1862)

• Dream on! Though Heaven may woo our open eyes,
  Through their closed lids we look on fairer skies;
  Truth is for other worlds, and hope for this;
  The cheating future lends the present's bliss;
  Life is a running shade, with fettered hands,
  That chases phantoms over shifting sands;
  Death a still spectre on a marble seat,
  With ever clutching palms and shackled feet;
  The airy shapes that mock life's slender chain,
  The flying joys he strives to clasp in vain,
  Death only grasps; to live is to pursue, —
  Dream on! there 's nothing but illusion true!
  • "The Old Player" (1861), in Songs in Many Keys (1862)

• Storms, thunders, waves!
  Howl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill;
  Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still
  But in their graves.
  • "Daily Trials" in Companion Poets (1871)

• Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!
  • A Mortal Antipathy (1885) This statement is often misquoted as "Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness."

• I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.
  • Part of a statement at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society (30 May 1860), generally quoted in a simplified form omitting Holmes's exceptions including opium and anaesthetics.
  • Throw out opium, which the Creator himself seems to prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in the cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to be fed there must also be a pain to be soothed; throw out a few specifics which our art did not discover, and it is hardly needed to apply; throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica [medical drugs], as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes.
  • As quoted in a review of Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science (1860) in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. 40 (1860), p. 467
  • Paraphrased variant: If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity.

• On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
  O love Divine, forever dear:
  Content to suffer, while we know,
  Living and dying, Thou art near!
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 596.

• I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.
  • 'Scholastic and Bedside Teaching', Introductory Lecture to the Medical Class of Harvard University (6 Nov 1867). In Medical Essays 1842-1882 (1891), 302.

Old Ironsides (1830)

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky

Written 16 September 1830 in response to reports that the U.S.S. Constitution was to be scrapped, it is generally credited with arousing public sentiment sufficient to save the ship, which remains a commissioned ship of the U.S. Navy to this day, the oldest floating commissioned naval vessel in the world.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high;

And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle shout, and burst the cannon's roar;

The meteor of the ocean air shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck once red with heroes' blood where knelt the vanquished foe;

When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, and waves were white below;

No more shall feel the victor's tread,or know the conquered knee;

The harpies of the shore shall pluck the eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered bulk should sink beneath the wave;

Her thunders shook the mighty deep, and there should be her grave;

Nail to the mast her holy flag, set every threadbare sail

And give her to the god of storms, the lightning and the gale!

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

• A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

• —All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

• He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, "Know thyself," never alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted existence! Why, the truths a man carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail? I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.

• Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
  One thing is certain: Love will triumph here!
  Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule,—
  The world's great masters, when you 're out of school,—
  Learn the brief moral of our evening's play
  Man has his will,—but woman has her way!

• Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

• I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it— but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

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

• Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still!

• Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.

• I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,— give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.

• Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
  • Ch. II

• The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.
  • Ch. VI

• Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned.

• Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.

• Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

• Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is force . . .

• You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.

• You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;—something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it.

• It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling.

• One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.

• Little I ask, my wants are few;
  I only wish a hut of stone,
  (A very plain brown stone will do,)
  That I may call my own;—
  And close at hand is such a one,
  In yonder street that fronts the sun.
  • "Contentment"

• You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your opinion really want your praise, and will be contented with nothing less.

• Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it.
  • Ch. XI

• Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. 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!"
  • Ch. XII

Elsie Venner (1859)

• Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while you are about it.

• Leverage is everything,—was what I used to say;—don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side.

• I do not know in what shape the practical question may present itself to you; but I will tell you my rule in life, and I think you will find it a good one. Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane. They are in-sane, out of health, morally. Reason, which is food to sound minds, is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless administered with the greatest caution; perhaps, not at all. Avoid collision with them, so far as you honorably can; keep your temper, if you can,—for one angry man is as good as another; restrain them from violence, promptly, completely, and with the least possible injury, just as in the case of maniacs,—and when you have got rid of them, or got them tied hand and foot so that they can do no mischief, sit down and contemplate them charitably...

• If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. And the temptation is to some natures a very great one. Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. In common life we shirk it by forming habits, which take the place of self-determination. In politics party-organization saves us the pains of much thinking before deciding how to cast our vote.

• We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity.

• All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.

• There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'

• What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,—'atheists,' heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just like other folks.

• You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It did n't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.

• We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

• What a miserable thing it is to be poor.

• The Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow.

The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)

First published in The Atlantic Monthly (May 1859)

• Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

• Most persons have died before they expire, — 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.

• Nobody talks much that doesn't say unwise things, — things he did not mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes.

• The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.

• Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

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

• Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

• So from the heights of Will
  Life's parting stream descends,
  And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
  Each widening torrent bends,
  From the same cradle's side,
  From the same mother's knee,
  —One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
  One to the Peaceful Sea!
  • "The Two Streams"

• You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

• The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men, — from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. It is in their hearts that the "sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its source. The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the other, — these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered in their delusion.

• Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified.

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

• I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.

• Knowledge—it excites prejudices to call it science—is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

• 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 of wood, you must make it of words . . .

• Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor.

• We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless."

• "I suppose you are an entomologist?"
  "Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name. No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp."

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• "I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity"

External links

• Oliver Wendell Holmes (Father and Son)
• Holmes at the Online Books Page
• Holmes at Project Gutenberg
• Hymns by Holmes