Famous quotes containing the words oliver wendell holmes, wendell holmes, oliver wendell, oliver, wendell and/or holmes:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“And when you stick on conversation’s burrs,
Don’t strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromwell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
““No, no; the real name,” said Holmes sweetly. “It is always awkward doing business with an alias.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)