Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

    “And when you stick on conversation’s burrs,
    Don’t strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.”
    —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    “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)

    “They say that in his prime,
    Ere the pruning-knife of Time
    Cut him down,
    Not a better man was found
    By the Crier on his round
    Through the town.”
    —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    “I have this very moment finished reading a novel called The Vicar of Wakefield [by Oliver Goldsmith].... It appears to me, to be impossible any person could read this book through with a dry eye and yet, I don’t much like it.... There is but very little story, the plot is thin, the incidents very rare, the sentiments uncommon, the vicar is contented, humble, pious, virtuous—but upon the whole the book has not at all satisfied my expectations.”
    —Frances Burney (1752–1840)

    “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)