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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894

"The Professor at the Breakfast-Table"

--No, I am too much a lover of
genius, I sometimes think, and too often get impatient with dull people,
so that, in their weak talk, where nothing is taken for granted, I look
forward to some future possible state of development, when a gesture
passing between a beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as
much as the complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled
to the time when its sun was burned out. And yet, when a strong brain is
weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble against
a wedge of gold.
--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
genius, but not a very great one. I am not sure that she will not
embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a brilliant
pattern already worked in its texture. But as the very essence of genius
is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which are always ideas behind
shows of form or language,) nothing is so contemptible as falsehood and
pretence in its eyes. Now it is not easy to find a perfectly true woman,
and it is very hard to find a perfectly true man.


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