Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

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Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-year-old's three-foot scale on a thirty-year-old's six-foot scale.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
I have no doubt that we have each one of us, somewhere, our exact facsimile, so like us in all things except the accidents of condition, that we should love each other like a pair of twins, if our natures could once fairly meet.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

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.
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.
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…

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.
"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.
When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.