01c. 1809 ADPeople that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
02c. 1809 ADEverybody 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 ADSin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
04c. 1809 ADThere 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 ADBoston 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.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
06c. 1809 ADThe axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
07c. 1809 ADThe world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
08c. 1809 ADKnowledge and timber should n't be much used till they are seasoned.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
10c. 1809 ADTo be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
11c. 1809 ADThe Sabbath brings its kind release, And Care lies slumbering on the lap of Peace.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
12c. 1809 ADThe bright black eye, the melting blue,— I cannot choose between the two.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
13c. 1809 ADThe great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
14c. 1809 ADWhen 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.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
15c. 1809 ADBe firm: one certain element in luck Is genuine, solid old Teutonic pluck.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
17c. 1809 ADThe nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
18c. 1809 ADIf 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.Oliver Wendell Holmes / quote ↗
19c. 1809 ADGeorge 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 ↗
20c. 1809 ADThose 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 ↗
21c. 1809 ADI 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 ↗
22c. 1809 ADThou 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 ↗
23c. 1809 ADI 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 ↗
24c. 1809 ADThe 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 ↗
