Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“ The automatic action, by which genius wrought its wonders, fails. There is only one thing which can rouse the machine; not will, - that cannot reach it; nothing but a ruinous agent, which hurries the wheels awhile and soon eats out the heart of the mechanism. The dreaming faculties are always the dangerous ones, because their mode of action can be imitated by artificial excitement; the reasoning ones are safe, because they imply continued voluntary effort.
I think you will find it true, that, before any vice can fasten on a man, body, mind, or moral nature must be debilitated. ”

“ But let me tell you, there are companies of men of genius into which I sometimes go, where the atmosphere of intellect and sentiment is so much more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.
Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by drinking. My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined before they became drunkards. The habit of drinking is often a vice, no doubt, - sometimes a misfortune, - as when an almost irresistible hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it, - but oftenest of all a punishment. ”

“ Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them; they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case, and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart, silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads. ”

“ But then, - he added, - we all think, if so and so, we should have been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those rhymes of yours.
- I don’t think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and sorrows, every literature is full. Nature carves with her own hands the brain which holds the creative imagination, but she casts the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould. ”

“ But to come back to poets and artists; - if they really are more prone to the abuse of stimulants, - and I fear that this is true, - the reason of it is only too clear. A man abandons himself to a fine frenzy, and the power which flows through him, as I once explained to you, makes him the medium of a great poem or a great picture. The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming. ”

“ A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his intellect.
- Where are the brains that are fullest of these ovarian eggs of thought? - I decline mentioning individuals. The producers of thought, who are few, the “jobbers” of thought, who are many, and the retailers of thought, who are numberless, are so mixed up in the popular apprehension, that it would be hopeless to try to separate them before opinion has had time to settle. ”

“ When I contemplate - said my friend, the Poet - the infinite largeness of comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence, how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition, - never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. ”

“ Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations, and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all. Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with melancholy. ”

“ There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry in their brains the ovarian eggs of the next generation’s or century’s civilization. These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet; some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and these are what must form the future. A man’s general notions are not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the minds of others. ”

“ The way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it, - to say that it has no attractions, when everybody knows that it has, - but rather to let it make out its case just as it certainly will in the moment of temptation, and then meet it with the weapons furnished by the Divine armory. ”

“ When one reads the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, - of so many gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before their time, - one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out singing, like the swan in the old story. ”

“ Unless the will maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other. They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice, by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of going for a while, and at last spoil the machine. ”

“ Now that my winter’s work is over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn to the Poet’s company. I don’t know anybody more alive to life than he is. The passion of poetry seizes on him every spring, he says, - yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he feels most, he can sing least. ”

“ I don’t think they are the first to see one’s defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of a true poem. Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a bow-string, - to a woman and it is a harp-string. ”

“ After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry - simple adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them - show themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they ought to, though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and perishable? ”

“ And so singing, their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and, still singing, they drop it and pass onward.
- Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection. ”

“ When a lady walks the streets, she leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces framed in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a right to see them.
- When we observe how the same features and style of person and character descend from generation to generation, we can believe that some inherited weakness may account for these peculiarities. ”

“ There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of blondes. [Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table. - Please to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.] Why, there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of coloring matter, - negative or washed blondes, arrested by Nature on the way to become albinesses. There are others that are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various degree, - positive or stained blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike a snowball. ”

“ Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of the mind which work independently of the will, - poets and artists, for instance, who follow their imagination in their creative moments, instead of keeping it in hand as your logicians and practical men do with their reasoning faculty, - such men are too apt to call in the mechanical appliances to help them govern their intellects. ”

“ Follow the course of opinion on the great subjects of human interest for a few generations or centuries, get its parallax, map out a small arc of its movement, see where it tends, and then see who is in advance of it or even with it ”

“ There are persons - I said - who no sooner come within sight of you than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth, which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about themselves, - and so look at you with a wretched mixture of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both, which are betrayed by the cowardly behaviour of the eye and the tell-tale weakness of the lips that characterize these unfortunate beings. ”

“ When a fit of intellectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you what I have found admirable as a diversion, in addition to boating and other amusements which I have spoken of, - that is, working at my carpenter’s-bench. Some mechanical employment is the greatest possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to tire. ”

“ There is no more beautiful illustration of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life. ”

“ If mind and body were both healthy and had food enough and fair play, I doubt whether any men would be more temperate than the imaginative classes. But body and mind often flag, - perhaps they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or ideas, overworked, or abused in some way. ”

“ It sometimes seems to me, as I know it does to others who have told me so, that they ought to be all best, - if not in actual execution, at least in plan and motive. I am grateful - he continued - for all such criticisms. A man is always pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the highest aspect of his nature get the most sunshine. ”

“ I am not such a hard-souled being as to apply this to the neglected poor, who have had no chance to fill their heads with wholesome ideas, and to be taught the lesson of self-government. I trust the tariff of Heaven has an ad valorem scale for them - and all of us. ”

“ I tell you, the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought before he works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle. Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary man to have a profession. ”

“ Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that of meaningless blushing may be fallen into by very good people who met often, or sit opposite each other at table. A true gentleman’s face is infinitely removed from all such paltriness, - calm-eyed, firm-mouthed. ”

“ There are some very pretty, but, unhappily, very ill-bred women, who don’t understand the law of the road with regard to handsome faces. Nature and custom would, no doubt, agree in conceding to all males the right of at least two distinct looks at every comely female countenance, without any infraction of the rules of courtesy or the sentiment of respect. ”

“ The first look is necessary to define the person of the individual one meets so as to avoid it in passing. Any unusual attraction detected in a first glance is a sufficient apology for a second, - not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but an appreciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may inoffensively yield to a passing image. ”

“ One must be in the habit of talking with such persons to get at these rudimentary germs of thought; for their development is necessarily imperfect, and they are moulded on new patterns, which must be long and closely studied. ”

“ The mosses and fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious parasites which fasten on the human frame choose that which is already enfeebled. Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, declared that he had such a healthy skin it was impossible for any impurity to stick to it, and maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a face which was of necessity always clean. ”

“ Empty heads, - heads without ideas in wholesome variety and sufficient number to furnish food for the mental clockwork, - ill-regulated heads, where the faculties are not under the control of the will, - these are the ones that hold the brains which their owners are so apt to tamper with, by introducing the appliances we have been talking about. Now, when a gentleman’s brain is empty or ill-regulated, it is, to a great extent, his own fault ”

“ I have heard an immense number of moral physicians lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all, but was all body and tail. ”