“The reader from whom I expect something must possess three qualities: he must be calm and must read without haste; he must not be ever interposing his own personality and his own culture; and he must not expect as the ultimate results of his study of his pages that he will be presented with a set of new formulae.” (Nietzsche, The Future of Our Educational Institutions)

“The golden rule should govern us in dealing with those whom we call unbelievers, with heathen, and with all who do not accept our religious views. The Jews are with us as a perpetual lesson to teach us modesty and civility. The religion we profess is not self-evident. It did not convince the people to whom it was sent. We have no claim to take it for granted that we are all right, and they are all wrong. And, therefore, in the midst of all the triumphs of Christianity, it is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in the Father’s earthly house as well as in the heavenly one; that civilized humanity, longer in time and broader in space than any historical form of belief, is mightier than any one institution or organization it includes… Recognizing the fact that I was born to a birthright of national and social prejudices against ‘the chosen people’ — chosen as the object of contumely and abuse by the rest of the world, — I pictured my own inherited feelings of aversion in all their intensity, and the strain of thought under the influence of which those prejudices gave way to a more human, a more truly Christian feeling of brotherhood.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes sr., Over the Teacups, 1890)

“One of my prescriptions for longevity may startle you somewhat. It is this: Become the subject of a mortal disease. Let half a dozen doctors thump you, and knead you, and test you in every possible way, and render their verdict that you have an internal complaint; they don’t know exactly what it is, but it will certainly kill you by and by. Then bid farewell to the world and shut yourself up for an invalid. If you are threescore years old when you begin this mode of life, you may very probably last twenty years, and there you are, — an octogenarian. In the mean time, your friends outside have been dropping off, one after another, until you find yourself almost alone, nursing your mortal complaint as if it were your baby, hugging it and kept alive by it, — if to exist is to live. Who has not seen cases like this, — a man or a woman shutting himself or herself up, visited by a doctor or a succession of doctors (I remember that once, in my earlier experience, I was the twenty-seventh physician who had been consulted), always taking medicine, until everybody was reminded of that impatient speech of a relative of one of these invalid vampires who live on the blood of tired-out attendants, ‘I do wish she would get well — or something’? Persons who are shut up in that way, confined to their chambers, sometimes to their beds, have a very small amount of vital expenditure, and wear out very little of their living substance. They are like lamps with half their wicks picked down, and will continue to burn when other lamps have used up all their oil. An insurance office might make money by taking no risks except on lives of persons suffering from mortal disease.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes sr., Over the Teacups, 1890)

“The great division between human beings is into the Ifs and the Ases… This is the meaning of those two words as I interpret them: If it were, — if it might be, — if it could be, — if it had been. One portion of mankind go through life always regretting, always whining, always imagining. These are the people whose backbones remain cartilaginous all their lives long, as do those of certain other vertebrate animals, — the sturgeons, for instance. A good many poets must be classed with this group of vertebrates.

“As it is, — this is the way in which the other class of people look at the conditions in which they find themselves. They may be optimists or pessimists, — they are very largely optimists,– but, taking things just as they find them, they adjust the facts to their wishes if they can; and if they cannot, then they adjust themselves to the facts. I venture to say that if one should count the Ifs and the Ases in the conversation of his acquaintances, he would find the more able and important persons among them — statesmen, generals, men of business — among the Ases, and the majority of the conspicuous failures among the Ifs. I don’t know but this would be as good a test as that of Gideon, — lapping the water or taking it up in the hand. I have a poetical friend whose conversation is starred as thick with ifs as a boiled ham is with cloves. But another friend of mine, a business man, whom I trust in making my investments, would not let me meddle with a certain stock which I fancied, because, as he said, ‘there are too many ifs in it. As it looks now, I would n’t touch it’.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes sr., Over the Teacups, 1890)

“I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic. These attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm in, — a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But what a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for immortality!” (Oliver Wendell Holmes sr., Over the Teacups, 1890)

“It is the age of accurate translation. The present generation has produced a complete library of versions of the great classics, chiefly in prose, partly in verse, more faithful, true, and scholarly than anything ever produced before. It is the photographic age of translation; and all that the art of sun-pictures has done for the recording of ancient buildings, and more than that, the art of literal translation has done for the understanding of ancient poetry. A complete translation of a great poem is, of course, an impossible thing. The finest translation is at best but a copy of a part; it gives us more or less crudely some element of the original; the color, the light and shade, the glow, are not there, lost as completely as they are in a photograph. But in the large photograph — say of the Sistine Madonna — the lines and the composition are there, as no human hand ever drew them. And so, in a fine translation, the thought survives. One method gives us one element, another method some fresh element, and together we may get some real impression of the mighty whole. Now, when some of us may have partly lost touch of the original, and some may never have acquired it, the use of translations, especially the use of varied translations, may give us much.” (Frederic Harrison, The Choice of Books, 1891)

“Latin in the twelfth century was a study of as much practical importance as English composition in the twentieth. It was not only the language of literature, of the Church, of the law-courts, of all educated men, but of ordinary correspondence: the language in which a student will write home for a pair of boots, or suggest that it is the part of a discreet sister to inflame the affection of the relations, nay, even the brother-in-law, of a deserving scholar, who at the moment has neither sheets to his bed, nor shirt to his back, and in which she will reply that she is sending him two pairs of sheets and 100 sol., but not a word to my husband, or ‘I shall be dead and destroyed [mortua essem penitus et destructa]. I think he means to send you something himself’; or, a more delicate matter, to a sweetheart, that he sees a fellow-student ruffling it in the girdle he had given her, and fears her favours have gone with it. ‘I could stand the loss of the belt’, says he magnificently. Clearly, an even livelier language than the Latin of Erasmus or More.” (Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars, 1927)

“A barrister made a long speech in the course of which a boy fell asleep in the gallery and fell into the well of the court and broke his neck. At common law the instrument with which a murder was committed was forfeited to the Crown. Hence the indictment had to charge and the jury had to find its value. The barrister was indicted in the Circuit Grand Court for murder with a certain dull instrument, to wit, a long speech of no value.” (Roscoe Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times, 1953)

“Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our dredges. The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins. Nothing more clearly separates a vulgar from a superior mind, than the confusion in the first between the little that it truly knows, on the one hand, and what it half knows and what it thinks it knows on the other.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, sr., Medical Essays)

“In 1741 Sir Robert Walpole, defending himself in Parliament against an impeachment proceeding brought by William Pulteney, concluded with the pious hope, drawn from Horace, that he had been guilty of nothing, and need grow pale at no wrongdoing: ‘Nil conscire sibi nulli pallescere culpae.’ Pulteney leapt at once — but to correct the grammar of the Horatian tag: ‘Your Latin is as bad as your logic: nullA pallescere culpA!’ So delicate a textual point — whether Horace had written a dative or an ablative — could not be left unresolved. A guinea was wagered upon it, and the matter was appealed to the clerk of Parliament, who quickly rejected Walpole’s reading in favor of Pulteney’s. Such widely shared learning is hard to imagine now, but it would be even harder had it been displayed over the body of any poet other than Horace. The friend of Virgil, Maecenas, and the emperor Augustus, he has commended himself with equal address to generations of Europeans, and to the English in particular. One of Thackeray’s characters was quite content with an education that enabled one to ‘quote Horace respectably through life.’ Nor is it Horace’s words alone that we cherish. We peep and botanize upon his grave, investing him with a kind of posthumous personality. ‘Fat, beery, beefy Horace’ was the image purveyed to schoolchildren, who were encouraged to view him as a kind of superior scout-master, or freshman adviser. His followers seem to agree, archly, even upon the glint in his eye and the likelihood that, given the opportunity, he would have smoked a pipe or a good cigar.” (Steele Commager, Honest Eggs?)