Oliver Wendell Holmes

Famous quotes containing the words oliver wendell holmes, wendell holmes, oliver wendell, oliver and/or wendell:

    How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no “facts” at this table.
    —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    When it’s over I don’t want to wonder
    if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
    I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
    or full of argument.
    I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
    —Mary Oliver (b. 1935)

    Alas for those two loving ones! she waked not from her swound,
    And he was taken with the cramp, and in the waves was drowned;
    But Fate has metamorphosed them, in pity of their woe,
    And now they keep an oyster-shop for mermaids down below.
    —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)