Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

    People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.”
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
    —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,
    I watched that wretched man,
    And since, I never dare to write
    As funny as I can.
    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)

    Year after year beheld the silent toil
    That spread his lustrous coil;
    Still as the spiral grew,
    He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
    Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
    Built up its idle door,
    Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
    —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)