Oliver Wendell Holmes citáty
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Dátum narodenia: 29. august 1809
Dátum úmrtia: 7. október 1894
Oliver Wendell Holmes bol americký lekár, spisovateľ a básnik.
Citáty Oliver Wendell Holmes
„It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.“
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Context: You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It didn't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.
„Death only grasps; to live is to pursue, —
Dream on! there 's nothing but illusion true!“
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Context: Dream on! Though Heaven may woo our open eyes,
Through their closed lids we look on fairer skies;
Truth is for other worlds, and hope for this;
The cheating future lends the present's bliss;
Life is a running shade, with fettered hands,
That chases phantoms over shifting sands;
Death a still spectre on a marble seat,
With ever clutching palms and shackled feet;
The airy shapes that mock life's slender chain,
The flying joys he strives to clasp in vain,
Death only grasps; to live is to pursue, —
Dream on! there 's nothing but illusion true!
"The Old Player" (1861), in Songs in Many Keys (1862).
„Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself.“
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Context: Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while you are about it.
„There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'“
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Context: There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'.
„You can never be too cautious in your prognosis, in the view of the great uncertainty of the course of any disease not long watched, and the many unexpected turns it may take.“
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Context: You can never be too cautious in your prognosis, in the view of the great uncertainty of the course of any disease not long watched, and the many unexpected turns it may take.
I think I am not the first to utter the following caution : —
Beware how you take away hope from any human being. Nothing is clearer than that the merciful Creator intends to blind most people as they pass down into the dark valley. Without very good reasons, temporal or spiritual, we should not interfere with his kind arrangements. It is the height of cruelty and the extreme of impertinence to tell your patient he must die, except you are sure that he wishes to know it, or that there is some particular cause for his knowing it. I should be especially unwilling to tell a child that it could not recover; if the theologians think it necessary, let them take the responsibility. God leads it by the hand to the edge of the precipice in happy unconsciousness, and I would not open its eyes to what he wisely conceals.
Valedictory Address to medical graduates at Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158; this has also been paraphrased "Beware how you take away hope from another human being".
„You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them.“
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Context: You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It didn't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.
