"Oliver Wendell Holmes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physic, drink, plaisters or oils," as well as religion. The men who practised physic were generally homebred, making the greater part of their living at farming or agriculture. Some were ministers as well as physicians, and one of them (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes is sorry to say) "took to drink and tumbled into the Connecticut River, and so ended." There were a number of regularly trained doctors, such as John Clark of Newbury, Fuller of Plymouth, Rossiter of Guilford, and others; and the younger Winthrop, though not a physician, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... time, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who has since become famous as a writer, was a young man twenty years of age, about completing his ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... more distinguished for personality and buffoonery than wit. Halleck's Fanny looks as if it might be good, did we only know something of the people satirized in it. The reputed comic poet of the country at present is OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, a physician. Whether it was owing to the disappointment caused by hearing too much in his praise beforehand we will not pretend to say, but it certainly did seem to us that Dr. Holmes' efforts in this line must originally have been intended to act upon his patients emetically. After a conscientious ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... American literature has been at its very best in the essay. In the essay, with few exceptions, it has more often than elsewhere attained world-wide estimation. Emerson, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes were primarily essayists. Hawthorne and Irving were essayists as much as romancers. Franklin was a common sense essayist. Jonathan Edwards will some day be presented (by excerpt) as a moral essayist of a high ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... "Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes," she read aloud. "Haven't you any other American authors?" she demanded in amazement. "And how did you know I was ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... not let ourselves be misled by the association of particular forms with particular words, but should follow the sound advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and submit such words to a process of depolarisation, which brings out their real meaning. Whether we call our act "prayer" or "thought-concentration," we mean the same thing; it is the claim of the man to move the Infinite by the action of his ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Jonathan Edwards, Mark and Albert Hopkins, Senator Henry L. Dawes, Governor Edwin D. Morgan, of New York, George F. Root, the musical composer, Governor George N. Briggs, of Massachusetts, Governor and Senator Francis E. Warren, of Wyoming, the Deweys, the Barnards, a list too long for quoting. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose grandfather was ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... ever played on the 'Varsity team. Then came a course in the law school of that university, and admission to the California bar in 1900. All this reads like the biography of a lawyer: so did the early life of James Russell Lowell, and of Oliver Wendell Holmes: they were all admitted to the bar, but they did not become lawyers. James Hopper had done some newspaper work for San Francisco papers while he was in law school, and the love of writing had taken hold of him. In the meantime he had married Miss Mattie E. Leonard, and ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... distinguished senator, Governor Seward." Robert C. Winthrop to the Constitutional Union Committee of Troy, February 17.—Winthrop's Addresses and Speeches, Vol. 2, p. 701. "If Mr. Seward moves in favour of compromise, the whole Republican party sways like a field of grain before his breath." Letter of Oliver Wendell Holmes, February 16, 1861.—Motley's ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... With Oliver Wendell Holmes comes the last of this brief American list of honor. No other American has so combined delicacy with the New England humor. We should be poorer by many a smile without "My Aunt" and "The Deacon's Masterpiece." But this is ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... drain the soul of its life blood and compass its destruction. But Evadne escaped without permanent injury, for, fortunately for herself, among much that was far too sweet to be wholesome she discovered Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Breakfast Table Series," "Elsie Venner," and "The Guardian Angel" and was insensibly fixed in her rightful place ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of Phillips Academy was the gift of John Lowell and Oliver Wendell, the grandfathers of Oliver Wendell Holmes; and probably, though not certainly, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... Oratory. During years from 1885 to 1889 he taught private classes in English and American literature, and lectured in and about Boston on Browning, Shakespeare, the drama, etc., writing and studying meanwhile in the public library. In Boston he made the acquaintance of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Edward Everett Hale, Edwin Booth, and other leaders in literature ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's practice approaches nearer to abstinence as he grows older. The Bishop of Durham finds that, on the whole, he can work for more consecutive hours, and with greater application, than when he used stimulants. This, too, is the testimony of Bishop Temple. ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... beneath and the waters under the earth, and behind him sat one who patted him upon the back, and looked at intervals over his shoulder at the glorious work, and then wrote in a book a eulogy thereof; and I, too, came and looked over the painter's shoulder, and I muttered, with Oliver Wendell Holmes, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... which any surgeon might make, and which surgeons all over the world did make within the next few weeks. Then there came a lingering outcry from a few surgeons, notably some of the Parisians, that the shock of pain was beneficial to the patient, hence that anaesthesia—as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes had christened the new method—was a procedure not to be advised. Then, too, there came a hue-and-cry from many a pulpit that pain was God-given, and hence, on moral grounds, to be clung to rather than renounced. But the outcry of the antediluvians of both hospital ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and originality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having changed its period and given it an Italian setting, wove about it one of the finest and most imaginative of his short-stories, Rappaccini's Daughter. Oliver Wendell Holmes, with a freshness and vigor all his own, developed out of it his fictional biography of Elsie Venner. And so recent a writer as Mr. Richard Garnett, attracted by the subtle and magic possibilities of the conception, has given us yet another rendering, restoring to the story its classic setting, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once made the remark that if one wished to live a long life he should be afflicted with some incurable disease. This was thought to be merely a joke, but it has foundation in fact. Many men with poor constitutions live to a very advanced age. They study themselves and live simply. They realize ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee school-marm, the cider and the salt codfish of the Eastern States, are responsible for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from across the water without paying for 'em, and the snort of delight ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... semi, makes a sound resembling the sound of the words "Katie did!" Hence the name—one of the few corresponding to the names given to the Japanese semi, such as tsuku-tsuku-boshi, or minmin-semi. The most interesting composition upon this cicada is by Oliver Wendell Holmes, but it is of the lighter sort of verse, with a touch of humour in it. I shall quote a few verses only, as the piece contains some allusions that would ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... American writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, described adjectives of that class as the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy. You have hit on the ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... in a library" was the phrase Oliver Wendell Holmes used in describing in part his felicities in boyhood. One of the most important things that wise students get out of their schooldays is a familiarity with books in various departments of learning. The ability ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Aldrich, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Annie Adams Fields, Louise Imogen Guiney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Thomas William Parsons, John James Piatt, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Hiram Rich, Edward Rowland Sill, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Bayard Taylor, Henry David Thoreau, Maurice Thompson, John Greenleaf ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... throng. Second, that 31st of August, 1837, when Ralph Waldo Emerson read the remarkable discourse to whose calm, wise, and thrilling words the hearts of men who were young then still vibrate, and to which their lives have responded; and third, the day in 1836 when Oliver Wendell Holmes read his poem, "A Metrical Essay," which is the traditional Phi Beta Kappa poem, as Everett's and Emerson's are the traditional orations. Richard H. Dana, Jr., calls Everett's discourse the first of a kind of which since then there have been brilliant ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... I have ever written. I repeat to myself the rather striking epigram I made at Smith's house last week, and I go back to the old gentleman from Andover who two years ago told me that there was something about me that reminded him of Oliver Wendell Holmes. By dint of much trying I work myself up into something of a glow; but it is all artificial, cerebral, incubated. The exaltation is momentary, the cold chill of fact overtakes me. There is no use in deceiving one's self. Philip is ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... and get a glimpse of his serious side, which so seldom peeps out for the world to see: "Old Oliver Wendell Holmes," he says, "is only too true when he says that most of us are 'boys all our lives'; we have our toys, and will play with them with as much zest at eighty as at eight, that in their company we can never grow old. I can't help it if my toys take the form of all that has to do with veldt ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... institution. July 4. Addressed a great gathering at Pittsburg. July 5. Removed his business offices to Oyster Bay for the summer. August 11. Retirement of Justice Gray of the Supreme Court; the President named Oliver Wendell Holmes as his successor. August 22. The President began a twelve days' tour of New England. September 3. Narrow escape from death near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Trolley car ran down carriage, killing Secret Service attendant. September 6 and ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... while opposite convictions still keep a battle front against each other, the time for law has not yet come; the notion destined to prevail is not yet entitled to the field," "Law and the Court," address by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., before the ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... Bullen) the chief drawings are entirely in wash, and yet are singularly decorative in their effect. The "Story of Jack Bannister's Fortunes" shows the artist's "colonial" style, "Men of Iron," "A Modern Aladdin," Oliver Wendell Holmes' "One-Horse Shay," are other fairly recent volumes. His illustrations have not been confined to his own stories as "In the Valley," by Harold Frederic, "Stops of Various Quills" (poems by W. D. Howells), ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... first time I saw Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had invited Miss Sullivan and me to call on him one Sunday afternoon. It was early in the spring, just after I had learned to speak. We were shown at once to his library where we found him seated in a big armchair by an open fire which glowed and crackled on the hearth, thinking, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking in England, said something to this effect: "You think we have no classes in America because we have no titles to distinguish them. But a barbed wire fence is as effectual in keeping out intruders as one of boards, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... remarkable effect is clearly shown by an experiment which the late Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes used to take delight in performing in his anatomical lectures at the Harvard Medical College. He had a strong iron bar made into a ring of some eight inches in diameter, with a space left between the ends just large enough to be ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... admirably. The first lecture was given at Salem where, because of Mr. Bell's previous residence and many friends, a large audience packed the hall. Then Boston desired to know more of the invention and an appeal for a lecture signed by Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other distinguished citizens was forwarded to Mr. Bell. The Boston lectures were followed by others in New York, Providence, and the principal ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... filled me with admiration, but if I want rest and peace I just think of the houses of Mrs. James Fields and Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was another personage in Boston life when I first went there. Oh, the visits I inflicted on him—yet he always seemed pleased to see me, the cheery, kind man. It was generally winter when I called on him. At once it was "four feet upon a fender!" Four feet upon a fender was his idea ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... have gone up and down the hill, but the cross-street, Charles, although not so attractive, is nevertheless as rich in literary associations as any in Boston. Here lived, for a short time, at 164, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and at 131—also for a short time—Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It is, however, at 148, that we should longest pause. This, for many rich years, was the home of James T. Fields, that delightful man of letters ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... connected with Yale College; and from other gentlemen of distinction and ability, upon various topics. JOHN W. ANDREWS, Esq., of Columbus, O., delivered the oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society; his subject was the Progress of the World during the last half century. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, of Cambridge, delivered the poem, which was one of his most admirable productions—a blending of the most exquisite descriptive and sentimental poetry with the finest humor, the keenest wit, and the most effective sarcasm. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... forsaken his original and mistaken diet when he did. The writer once heard an acquaintance ridicule vegetarianism on the ground that Thoreau died of pulmonary consumption at forty-five! One is reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes' witty saying:—'The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye: the more it sees the light, the ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... essays and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric, sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they are not meant ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of his famous Reunion Poem, "The Boys," Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes commemorated his old friend and college-mate, Dr. Samuel Francis Smith, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... names. Catherine M. Sedgwick began her literary career with "Hope Leslie," a story founded on the early history of Massachusetts, which was followed by "Redwood" and "The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied New England village life in "Elsie Venner," and Sylvester Judd that of the Maine backwoods in "Margaret." Mr. T.W. Higginson has written "Malbone." Mr. W.D. Howells, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, and Miss E.S. Phelps are still ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... him. Here we passed a week. I especially enjoyed seeing my little niece and nephew, the only grandchildren in the family. The girl was the most beautiful child I ever saw, and the boy the most intelligent and amusing. He was very fond of hearing me recite the poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes entitled "The Height of the Ridiculous," which I did many times, but he always wanted to see the lines that almost killed the man with laughing. He went around to a number of the bookstores one day and inquired for them. I told him afterward ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Oliver Wendell Holmes, of the Supreme Court, who was going abroad for the summer, a letter which he was "indiscreetly" to show Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Balfour, and two or three other prominent Englishmen. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... may still be seen in the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, N. H. The following famous poem, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, saved the grand old ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... has produced many good speakers, among them Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Edwin Booth, Wm. Charles Macready, and Edward Everett. Of the last Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "It is with delight that one who remembers Edward Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, recalls his full blown, high colored, double flowered periods; the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... America. Mr. Quincy was the President of the evening. About two hundred gentlemen sat at the tables, the brilliant company including George Bancroft, Richard H. Dana, Sr., Richard H. Dana, Jr., Washington Allston, the painter, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George S. Hillard, Josiah Quincy, President of Harvard College, the Governor of the State, the Mayor of the city, and Thomas C. Grattan, the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809. He was educated at Harvard College and studied medicine, spending two years in the hospitals of Europe. He was successively professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth College, a physician in regular practice in Boston, and ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... to admit. For I think I am not making a sweeping assertion when I state that not one tolerably healthy man in five hundred knows what it is to have nerves such as are the birthright of his mother, sister, and wife. And yet how well the physician, poet, autocrat and professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, knows and sympathizes with this weakness in us! He touches the truth in a direct way that wrings a sigh of familiar pain from many ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... sounds are the most vexing source of errors, especially where diphthongs are found. Who has not heard such errors as are hit off in this inimitable verse by Oliver Wendell Holmes: ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... MAY-FLOWER (nearly everything having, of course, gone to decay with the wear and tear of more than two hundred and fifty years), this honorable origin is still assigned to many heirlooms, to some probably correctly. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his delightful lines, "On Lending a Punch Bowl," humorously claims for his convivial silver vessel a place with ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... in Boston had extended to three months from the original fortnight we had planned for the visit. I had taken a few very good introductions there: to Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, Colonel Wentworth Higginson, and others of the Boston alumni, and as several receptions had been kindly arranged for us, and my name had appeared many times during the winter in various local papers, it ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... well known among us, long ago expressed to me the same opinion; and one of the greatest of living naturalists, who is honored alike on both continents, is positive that brain-work is harder and more hurtful here than abroad, an opinion which is shared by Oliver Wendell Holmes and other competent observers. Certain it is that our thinkers of the classes named are apt to break down with what the doctor knows as cerebral exhaustion,—a condition in which the mental organs become more or less completely ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... had happened before our day! It would have been easier to sort them about a hundred and fifty years ago. Yet, a hundred and fifty years ago there wouldn't have been an Emerson, a Thoreau, a Hawthorne, a Longfellow, a Whittier, a Bryant, a Lowell, or an Oliver Wendell Holmes, to say nothing of half a dozen others I'm too excited to recall at the moment. It would have been sad to come here before they lived and embroidered the tapestry of life with their lovely thoughts—almost ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... and Oliver Wendell Holmes, owed his amazing influence largely to his cheerful and wholesome this-worldliness. He was a sentimentalist, but obviously different in spirit from the two great English writers of sentiment who were most nearly his contemporaries. ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... Henry W. Longfellow. Oliver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell. The Town of Concord. Henry D. Thoreau. Louisa M. Alcott. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ralph Waldo ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... find me he was at the mercy of strangers. A young man who lives here and who is just in the heyday of life, gleefully consented to show the correspondent my new residence not yet completed. So they went over and examined the new Oliver Wendell Holmes Hospital, which will be completed in June and which is, of course, a handsome structure, but quite different from my house in ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... he assured her. "Say," he added, "where are all your modern novels? You've got Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, of course, and Eliot—yes, and here's Hawthorne and Poe. But I haven't struck anything later than Oliver Wendell Holmes." ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... suffering, "You're the fourth—I'm going to move." "The fourth what?" said I. "The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours—I'm going to move." "You don't tell me!" said I; "who were the others?" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—consound the lot!" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
