Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Holmes is taking aim at a particular Victorian vice: the cultivated persona that never contradicts itself. In an era when public respectability functioned like a social currency, “consistency” could become less a moral strength than a performance of coherence. The scare quotes do a lot of work. He’s not criticizing steadiness of character; he’s puncturing the pompous idea that a life must read like a perfectly edited argument.

“Be simple true” (Holmes’s compressed, almost Puritan syntax) carries the counter-program. Truth, for him, isn’t a polished doctrine you maintain; it’s a daily fidelity to what you actually see, feel, and learn. That means you might revise yourself. You might sound different at 40 than you did at 20. The subtext is anti-dogmatic and quietly anti-elitist: don’t let the demand for a seamless public narrative override the messier integrity of honest perception.

There’s also a literary jab here. Poets, like politicians, are tempted to protect an image: a “voice” that stays recognizable. Holmes suggests that the more admirable “voice” is the one willing to crack, to simplify, to say the plain thing even if it breaks continuity with yesterday’s cleverness.

Read now, it lands as a warning against personal-brand logic. Social media rewards consistency as an algorithmic virtue: repeatable takes, stable identity markers, no messy updates. Holmes offers a bracing alternative: let your through-line be sincerity, not sameness. Consistency can be a cage; “simple true” is permission to grow.