Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - Man Quotes

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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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
No, my friends, I go (always other things being equal) for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Wisdom has taught us to be calm and meek,
To take one blow, and turn the other cheek;
It is not written what a man shall do
If the rude caitiff smite the other too!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"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".

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Man wants but little drink below,
But wants that little strong.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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".

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal. "

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor man's necessities.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
A man's ignorance is as much his private property, and as precious in his own eyes, as his family Bible.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Then the white man hates him [the Native American], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Apologizing, — a very desperate habit, — one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.