WIDGER'S QUOTATIONS_Widger's Quotations from the Project Gutenberg Editions of the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr.

THE AUTOCRAT AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

(Originally published at Project Gutenberg by David Price)

[Etext #751] aofbt10.txt or aofbt10.zip

A little queer and uncertain in general aspect.

A misprint kills a sensitive author

A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer

Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies

Advised every literary man to have a profession.

Afraid of books who have not handled them from infancy

Age and neglect united gradually

Agreed on certain ultimata of belief

Algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak

All his geese are swans

All men are bores, except when we want them

All men love all women

All the forms of moral excellence, except truth

All want to reach old age and grumble when they get it

And now we two are walking the long path in peace together

Another privilege of talking is to misquote

Arc in the movement of a large intellect

As a child, he should have tumbled about in a library

As I understand truth

As to clever people's hating each other

Asked Solon what made him dare to be so obstinate

Assume a standard of judgment in our own minds

At the mercy of every superior mind

Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it

Automatic and involuntary actions of the mind

Babbage's calculating machine

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys

Beautiful effects from wit,--all the prismatic colors

Been in the same precise circumstances before

Behave like men and gentlemen about it, if you know how.

Bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors

Better too few words, from the woman we love

Bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your next suit

Blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy

Bowing and nodding over the music

Brain often runs away with the heart's best blood

Brilliant flashes--of silence!

Brute beasts of the intellectual domain

Bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors

But it was in talking of Life that we came most nearly together

But we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

C'est le DERNIER pas qui co–te

Called an old man for the first time

Cel… va sans dire

Character is distinctly shown at the age of or months.

Cigar

Clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them

Code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk

Comfort is essential to enjoyment

Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them

Common sense was good enough for him

Common sense, as you understand it.

Compare the racer with the trotter

Conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful

Conceit is just a natural thing to human minds

Conclusion that he or she is really dull

Consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact

Controversy

Conversation which is suggestive rather than argumentative

Conversational blank checks or counters

Conversational bully

Conversational fungi spring up most luxuriantly

Conversational soprano

Creative action is not voluntary at all

Crippled souls

Crow with a king-bird after him

Cut your climate to your constitution

Dangerous subjects

Demand for intellectual labor is so enormous

Did I believe in love at first sight?

Differ on the fundamental principles

Dishwater from the washings of English dandyism

Disputing about remainders and fractions

Do you ever wonder why poets talk so much about flowers?

Do you know how important good jockeying is to authors?

Don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world

Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man

Don't make your moral staple consist of the negative virtues

Doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self-estimate

Dulness is not commonly a game fish

Easier to dispute it than to disprove it

Easier to say this than to prove it

Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.

Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door

Extra talent does sometimes make people jealous

Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation

Few, if any, were ruined by drinking

Flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects.

Fortune had left her, sorrow had baptized her

Fortune is the measure of intelligence

Friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things

Gambling with dice or stocks

Gambling, on the great scale, is not republican

Generally ruined before they became drunkards

Genius in an essentially common person is detestable

Gift of seeing themselves in the true light

Give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light

Give us the luxuries of life

Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris

Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of us

Good for nothing until they have been long kept and used

Got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his forefoot

Governed, not by, but according to laws

Grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried

Great silent-moving misery puts a new stamp on us

Grow old early, if you would be old long

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that we love.

Habit is a labor-saving invention

Hard it is for some people to get out of a room

He that has once done you a kindness

He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues

Height of art to conceal art

Her breathing was somewhat hurried and high, or thoracic

Here lies buried the soul of the licentiate Pedro Garcias

Hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer

Hold their outspread hands over your head

Holes in all her pockets

Hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally

Hopelessly dull discourse acts inductively

How long will school-keeping take to kill you?

Hung with moss, looking like bearded Druids

Hydrostatic paradox of controversy

I allow no "facts " at this table

I always believed in life rather than in books

I always break down when folks cry in my face

I am my own son, as it seems to me

I had not thought love was ever meant for me.

I hate books

I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains

I have taken all knowledge to be my province

I love horses

I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds

I replied with my usual forbearance

I show my thought, another his

I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted.

I think I have not been attacked enough for it

If I thought I should ever see the Alps!

If so and so, we should have been this or that

If they have run as well as they knew how!

Il faut ne pas BRUTALISER la machine

In what direction we are moving

Incipit Allegoria Senectutis.

Infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies

Insanity

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked

Intellectual companions can be found easily

Is this the mighty occan?--is this all?

It is by little things that we know ourselves

It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time

Judge men's minds by comparing with mine

Keep his wit in the background

Key to this side-door

Knowledge and timber only useful when seasoned

La main de fer sous le gant de velours

Laid the egg of the Reformation which Luther hatched

Laughs at times at the grand airs "Science" puts on

Law of the road with regard to handsome faces

Leading a string of my mind's daughters to market

Leap at a single bound into celebrity

Learn anything twice as easily as in my earlier days

Leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies

Lecturer is public property

Let us cry!

Liability of all men to be elected to public office

Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiment

Life would be nothing without paper-credit

Like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel

Listen to what others say about subjects you have studied

Little great man

Little muscle which knows its importance

Little narrow streaks of specialized knowledge

Live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made

Living in a narrow world of dry habits

Logic

Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track

Long illness is the real vampyrism

Look through the silvered rings of the arcus senilis!

Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men

Love must be either rich or rosy

Love-capacity is a congenital endowment

Lying is unprofitable

Made up your mind to do when you ask them for advice

Man is father to the boy that was

Man of family

Man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket

Man's and a woman's dusting a library

Man's first life-story shall clean him out, so to speak

Mathematical fact

May doubt everything to-day if I will only do it civilly

Meaningless blushing

Mechanical invention had exhausted itself

Memory is a net

Men are fools, cowards, and liars all at once

Men grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay

Men of facts wait their turn in grim silence

Men that it weakens one to talk with an hour

Men that know everything except how to make a living

Men who have found new occupations when growing old

Might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!

Moralist and occasional sermonizer

Most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities

Moved as if all her articulations were elbow-joints

Much ashamed of some people for retaining their reason

Must be weaned from his late suppers now

Must not read such a string of verses too literally

Must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it

Napoleon's test

Nature dresses and undresses them

Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds

Nearest approach to flying that man has ever made

Neither make too much of flaws or overstatements

Never forget where they have put their money

No fresh truth ever gets into a book

No man knows his own voice

Nobody is so old he doesn't think he can live a year

Nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence

Oblivion as residuary legatee

Oblivion's Uncatalogued Library

Odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of.

Oh, so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

Old Age

Old age appear as a series of personal insults and indignities

Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension

One can generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough

One doesn't like to be cruel,--and yet one hates to lie

One that goes in a nurse may come out an angel

One very sad thing in old friendships

Open patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep

Oracle

Original, though you have uttered it a hundred times

Ought to produce insanity in every well-regulated mind

Our brains are seventy-year clocks

Overrate their own flesh and blood

Painted there by reflection from our faces

Passion never laughs

People in the green stage of millionism

People that make puns are like wanton boys

Person is really full of information, and does not abuse it

Personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures

Physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind

Plagiarism

Pluck survives stamina

Poem must be kept and used, like a meersehaum, or a violin

Poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences

Poetry, instead of making one other heart happy

Poor creature that does not often repeat himself

Poverty is evidence of limited capacity

Power of human beings is a very strictly limited agency

Power of music

Pride, in the sense of contemning others

Probabilities

Project a principle full in the face of obvious fact!

Provincial conceit, which some of us must plead guilty to.

Pun is primƒ facie an insult

Put coppers on the railroad-tracks

Qu'est ce qu'il a fait? What has he done?

Racing horses are essentially gambling implements

Rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories

Rather longer than usual dressing that morning

Rather meet three of the scowlers than one of the smilers.

Regained my freedom with a sigh

Religious mental disturbances

Remarkably intelligent audience

Remarks like so many postage-stamps

Returning thanks after a dinner of many courses

Ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions

Sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow

Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable

Saturation-point of each mind differs from that of every other

Scientific certainty has no spring in it

Scientific knowledge

Second story projecting

See if the ripe fruit were better or worse

Self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces

Self-made men?

Self-unconsciousness of genius

Sense of SMELL

"Settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver

Several false premises

Shake the same bough again

She who nips off the end of a brittle courtesy

SIN has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all

Six persons engaged in every dialogue between two

Small potatoes always get to the bottom.

Smiling at present follies

So much must be pardoned to humanity

So much woman in it,--muliebrity, as well as femineity

Society is a strong solution of books

Society of Mutual Admiration

Sold his sensibilities

Somebody had been calling him an old man

Something better than flowers; it is a seed-capsule

Something she is ashamed of, or ought to be.

Somewhere,-- somewhere,--love is in store for them

Stages of life

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad

Style is the man

Sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere

Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind

Talkers who have what may be called jerky minds

Talking is like playing on the harp

Talking is one of the fine arts

Talking shapes our thoughts for us

Talking with a dull friend affords great relief

Tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features

Temptation of money and fame is too great for young people

Tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm

Terrible smile

Thanklessness of critical honesty

That great procession of the UNLOVED

The Amen! of Nature is always a flower

The house is quite as much the body we live in

The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries

The schoolmistress had tried life, too

The way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it

The year eighteen hundred and ever-so-few

Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect

There is a higher law in grammar, not to be put down

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door

There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact

Think of the griefs that die unspoken!

Think only in single file front this day forward

Third vowel as its center

This is one of those cases in which the style is the man

This is the shortest way,--she said

Those who ask your opinion really want your praise

Time is a fact

To pay up, to own up, and to shut up, if beaten

To trifle with the vocabulary

Too late!---- "It might have been."----Amen!

Travellers change their guineas, but not their characters

Triumph of the ciphering hand-organ

True state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming

Truth must roll, or nobody can do anything with it

Truth's sharp corners get terribly rounded

Truths a man carries about with him are his tools

Turn over any old falsehood

Unadorned and in plain calico

Undertakers

Unpacks and unfolds incidental illustrations

Unpretending mediocrity is good

Virtually old when it first makes its appearance

Virtue passed through the hem of their parchment

Virtues of a sporting man

Vulgarism of language

Wait awhile!

Walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization

Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners

We always compare ourselves with our contemporaries.

We are all theological students

We carry happiness into our condition

We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies

We don't read what we don't like

We never tell our secrets to people that pump for them.

Wedded, faded away, threw themselves away

Wedding-ring conveys a right to a key to this side-door

Weeded their circle pretty well of these unfortunates

What a satire, by the way, is that machine

What are the great faults of conversation?

Whether anything can be conscious of its own flavor??

Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not

While she is silent, Nature is working for her

Who is in advance of it or even with it

Wholesale professional dealers in misfortune

Why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny?

Why did I not ask? you will say

Will you take the long path with me?

Winning-post a slab of white or gray stone

Wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

Wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

World calls him hard names, probably

World has a million roosts for a man, but only one nest.

Yes, I am a man, like another

Youth and age--something in the soul

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

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Anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's mouths

Answer him not

Apologizing --A very desperate habit

Apology is only egotism wrong side out

Celibacy of the clergy

Chose a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all

Consolations of religion

Conversational non-combatants

Didn't know Truth was such an invalid

Essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities

Faith dislikes being meddled with

Fear of open discussion implies feebleness

Genius

Good many coarse people in both callings

Happy to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible

Hardness in surgeons, just as there is in theologians

Hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors

Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people

I can't afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace

I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat

Inclination of two persons with a strong affinity

Intellectual non-combatant

It is so hard to prove a negative

Let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept

Life becomes to them as death and death as life

List of things that everybody says and nobody thinks

List of things that everybody thinks and nobobody says

Lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of evidence

Meddling with things that can take care of themselves

Most persons have died before they expire

No company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after

Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things

Not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth

Notion of private property in truth

Only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas

Opinions

Out of plumb when they sit side by side

Overestimate of our special individuality

Pathological piety

Perpetual insult to mediocrity

Plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world

Presumption in favor of any particular belief

Pseudo-science

Question everything

Saying one thing about it and believing another

Spiritualism

Surfeits of pathological piety

Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of thought

Talked as if I believed what I said

The dead-living

Took it for granted that he and his crowd were right

Torturing of dying people

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble

Truth never goeth without a scratcht face

Way the pseudo-sciences go to work

Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail

Whoso offers me any article of belief for my signature

Wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions

Wisdom is the abstract of the past

Woman fascinates a man quite as often by what she overlooks

Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give a kick

THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

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Age magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion

Allowed a set of monks to pull their hoods over our eyes

Associates facts by their accidental cohesion

Authority

Dogmatists

Don't like the word tolerant

Earnest

Emptied me of all my voluntary laughter

Enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at

Enthusiast

Epicure in words

Ever-ending and ever-beginning stories

Fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days

How does she go to work to help you? -- Why, she listens

I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts

If he knows anything, knows how little he knows

Intellectual myopia

Inventory of my faculties as calmly as if I were an appraiser

It is a woman's business to please

Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science

Life is a fatal complaint

Minds tossing on the unquiet waves of doubt

More science he has the worse for his patient

Most of us hope and many of us believe we shall

Must not roughly smash other people's idols

Never saw the man that couldn't teach me something

Pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness

Poetry is not an article of prime necessity, and potatoes are

Poets who never write verses

Privilege of wisdom to listen

Province of knowledge to speak

Question these charming old people before it is too late

Rather too anxious that I should be comfortable

Rounded back, convex with years of stooping over his minute work

Said something which another had often felt but never said

Satisfaction to the curious practitioner

Science without common sense

Scientific specialization

"Sentimentality," which is sentiment overdone

She always laughs and cries in the right places

Some people that think everything pitiable is so funny

Takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover

There is nothing I do not question

Two sides to everybody, as there are to that piece of money

Vacuous countenances

Virtues of her deceased spouse

We never need fear that he will undervalue himself

What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor?

What you hate in him is chiefly misfortune

Wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo

Young surgeon, old physician

OVER THE TEACUPS

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Acquiescence is the best of palliations

All of our brains squint more or less

Alternations of overvaluation and undervaluation of ourselves

At sixty we come "within range of the rifle-pits

Blessed are those who have said our good things for us

Cavil on the ninth part of a hair

Cerebral strabismus

Childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did

Consciousness is covered by layers of habitual thoughts

Content to remain more or less ignorant of many things

Controversialists

Cracked Teacup

Cultivated symptoms as other people cultivate roses

Curve of health

Difference in the extreme limits of life--little

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist

Do wish she would get well--or something

Endure philosophically what we cannot help

Enormous appetite for Old World titles of distinction

Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence

Every age has to shape the Divine image it worships over again

General practitioner submits to a servitude

Great privilege of old age was the getting rid of responsibility

Habits are the crutches of old age

He did not know so much about old age then as he does now

Hoard your life as a miser hoards his money

Homo unius libri--the man of one book

Hypocrisy of kind-hearted people

I dressed his wound, and God cured him

I told you so

Intellectual Over-Feeding and its consequence, Mental Dyspepsia

It is time to be old, To take in sail

Know enough of a wide range of subjects

Know something about everything, and everything about something

Less you think about your health the better

Man who knows too much about one particular subject

Nature's kindly anodyne

Never contradict a man with a squinting brain

Never to countenance a wrong because others did

No patience with any form of deceit or duplicity

Old Men's Tears

Old people have a right to be epicures, if they can afford it

Old women of both sexes

Outlived their usefulness

Persons with a strong instinctive tendency to contradiction

Pitying kindness

Pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought in range

Presumptions

Rapture of self-admiration

Reached and passed the natural limit of serviceable years

Remember past happiness in the hour of misery

Sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living

Squinting brains

Sufficient, not too much exercise

Tobacco, a soothing drug

Trespasser on the domain belonging to another generation

Truth is lost in its own excess

Unconscious plagiarism

Vieille fille fait jeune mariee

Voice that makes friends of everybody

Wants nothing but a bald spot and a wife

We must drop much of our foliage before winter is upon us

Weak-eyed fountain feebly weeping over its own insignificance

When one watches for symptoms, every organ in the body is ready

When we think we are thinking

With an effort that we admit a new author into the inner circle

World was a garden to me then; it is a churchyard now

Writer telling them something they have long known or felt

Young Doctor, waiting for his bald spot to come

ELSIE VENNER

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All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology

Appetite should be at war with no other purse than his own

Attacks of spiritual neuralgia

Bare hook and a coarse line are all that is needed

Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself

Beliefs must be lived in for a good while

Confession of weakness which does not wish to be strong

Conscience itself requires a conscience

Constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made up

Cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment

Criticise other people's modes of dealing with their children

Despair itself would have been like an anodyne

Don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side

Educational factory

Fall silent and think they are thinking

Habits, which take the place of self-determination

Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss

He almost lived in his library

I dressed his wound and God healed him

Judged the hearts of others by his own

Leverage is everything

Makes men imperious to sit a horse

Matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children

Means at least as much as he says

Measles Mumps And Sin,--that's always catching

Millstone round their necks, taking it for a life-preserver?

Mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity

Not quite dead enough to bury

Old Doctor did not believe in medicine

One angry man is as good as another

One of her "I think it's sos" is worth the Bible-oath

Outside observers see results; parents see processes

Passive endurance is the hardest trial

Priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of

Shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy

Slow to accept marvellous stories and many forms of superstition

So long as a woman can talk, there is nothing she cannot bear

Some people think that truth and gold are always to be washed for

Swap him for a `yallah dog,'--and then shoot the dog

Talked cautiously, feeling his way for sympathy

Taste of everything he carried in his saddlebags

Thin film of some emotional non-conductor between them

Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane

Tremulous movement of the muscles, which was worse than silence

We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin

We must have headway on, or there will be no piloting her

What a miserable thing it is to be poor

Why did n't I warn him about love and all that nonsense?

Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow

THE GUARDIAN ANGEL

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Alas! her simple words were true,--he had grown away from her

Been afraid since to like almost anything

Cold shower-bath the world furnishes gratis

Conflicting advice of all manner of officious friends

Don't be in a hurry to choose your friends

Dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the market-place

Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest

Getting married is jumping overboard

Grief must be fed with thought, or starve to death

Her only fault was that she had not grown with him

I am old and incombustible enough to be trusted

"I cannot help it"--the hysteric motto

Knew how to keep his knowledge to himself upon occasion

Library gathered like his is a looking-glass

Live folks are only dead folks warmed over

Love does not thrive without hope

Mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists

Most pathetic image in the world to many women - own tears

Not handicapped with any burdensome ideals

Nothing so humble that taste cannot be shown in it

Patronized, which is not a pleasant feeling

Picket-guard at the extreme outpost

Saint may be a sinner that never got down to "hard pan"

Talk without words is half their conversation

Truth is only safe when diluted

Turning bread and milk into the substance of little sinners

War--Organized barbarism

A MORTAL ANTIPATHY

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Beginners are very apt to make what they think are discoveries

Charlatanism always hobbles on two crutches

Doctor's wife must keep her tongue in

Dying, whose eyes may light up, but rarely shed a tear

Knows everything and doesn't believe anything

Lecturing to instruct myself

Lucky mishaps, or, more elegantly, fortunate calamities

Man who knows what is in books - and what is in men

Medicine deals chiefly in probabilities

Nervous revolutions

Never know the extent of darkness until it is partially illuminated

Others took assertions on trust

Perhaps I sha'n't believe in medicine enough to practise it

Persons who never are young--and never old

Physicians, of all men in the world, know how to wait

Sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance

Self-indulging and self-commiserating emotionalism

Self-love is a cup without any bottom

Shut out, not all light, but all the light they do not want

Struggle with the ever-rising mists of delusion

Tender spot of one or the other is carelessly handled

Theological students developed a third eyelid

What has the public to do with my private affairs

When gratitude is a bankrupt, love only can pay his debts

PASSAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE

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Accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of speech

Are a dozen additional spasms worth living for?

Fiat voluntas MEA,--let my will be done

Grief borne as men bear it, felt as women feel it

Guides have queer notions occasionally

He smiled an official smile

Ill health gives a certain common character to all faces

It was suggested that it might shorten life

Locomotive intoxication

Man is essentially an idolater

New discomfort in place of an old comfort is often a luxury

Officials become brutalized, I suppose, as a matter of course

Patients are not the property of their physicians

Philanthropists are commonly grave, occasionally grim

Prediction seems to stand in need of an extension

Prophecies

Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge

Teach the ignorance of what people do not want to know

Timid compromisers

We are all egotists in sickness and debility

Weakness had made him querulous

MEDICAL ESSAYS

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A man's ignorance is his private property

Affectation vital to the well-being of society

All these medications are, prima facie, injurious

All they want is to be let alone

An analogy is not an explanation

Argumentum ad ignorantiam

Assuming a falsehood as a fact, and giving reasons for it

At any rate it can do no harm

Bedside is always the true centre of medical teaching

Beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard

Better for mankind,--and all the worse for the fishes

Bewitching cup of self-quackery

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre

Coincidences

Colossal system of self-deception

Community is still overdosed

Confound belief with evidence

Congenital incapacity for life

Count the pulse; also note the time of day

Counting only their favorable cases

Cut all their throats, sweetly

Diseases get well without being "cured,"

Dislike whatever shakes the dust out of their traditions

Drugs should always be regarded as evils

Dullest of teachers is the one who does not know what to omit

Earned your money by the dose you have taken

Exception of opium, wine, specifics, and anaesthetics

Express your opinions freely; defend them rarely

Extra price for gilding his rich patients' pills

Extravagance in remedies and trust in remedies

False appetite in many intelligences

Fearless in the face of authority

Find most of the old beliefs alive amongst us to-day

Flippant loquacity of half knowledge

Follies and inanities, imposing on the credulous

Futility of attempting to silence this asserted science

Generalize the disease and individualize the patient

Half knowledge dreads nothing but whole knowledge

Half-censure divided between the parties

I am too much in earnest for either humility or vanity

Ignorance is a solemn and sacred fact

Imperative demand of patients and their friends

Invectives against such as dared to doubt the dogmas

Kept extreme remedies for extreme cases

Logical errors

Loud outcry on a slight touch reveals the weak spot

Medical Jounals must find something to fill their columns

Medical logic which does not seem to have been taught

Medicines proper, which hurts a well man, hurts a sick one

Much as you know, something is still left for you to learn

Mutual respect of which outward courtesy is the sign

Natural incapacity for sound observation

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors

None of my business to inquire what other persons think

One whose patients are willing to die in his hands

Opium, which the Creator himself seems to prescribe

Over-medication are to a great extent masked by disease

Pegs to hang facts upon

Physician and the disease entered, hand in hand

Point of mental saturation

Post hoc ergo propter hoc error

Presumption in favor of poisoning

Presumption is always against treatments

Pretensions of presumptuous ignorance

Pseudological inanity

Public itself, which insists on being poisoned

Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal

Qui a bu, boira

Rapid rotation of scientific crops

Save all our old treasures of knowledge and mine deeply for new

Sick must have somewhat wherewith to busy their thoughts

Single combats between dead authors and living housemaids

Singular inability to weigh the value of testimony

Special gift of the man born for a teacher

Student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge

Sweeping statistical documents

Take down your sign, or never put it up

The withered branch of science: medicine

They are not well if they do not have them

Time is a very elastic element in Geology and Prophecy

True meaning of the word "cure"

Trust more in nature and less in their plans of interference

Ubi tres medici, duo athei

Vast community of quacks, with or without the diploma

Vowed these gifts to the altar, and the gods saved them

Vulgar love of paradox

Where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins

Whether they had better live at all

Why we teach so much that is not practical

Wise enough to confess the fact of absolute ignorance

Words that few understand and most will shortly forget

Yielding to the tendency to self-delusion

Young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions

THE ENTIRE GUTENBERG FILES OF HOLMES

[Etext #3252] ohent10.txt or ohent10.zip