Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Holmes is selling a peculiarly 19th-century fantasy: that the body can be trained into a moral résumé. “Stillness” and “steadiness” sound like neutral virtues until you notice the social sorting baked into them. Good breeding, in this world, isn’t just manners; it’s legibility. The well-bred person is someone whose face doesn’t betray need, anger, hunger, or desire, someone who can sit in a room and never force the room to deal with their interior life.

That’s the intent: to elevate self-control into a visible class marker. “Signal marks” gives the game away. These aren’t private qualities, they’re semiotics - outward cues that let others place you quickly and comfortably. Holmes, a Brahmin-ish New England voice steeped in genteel codes, is writing from a culture obsessed with restraint: the era’s parlor rooms, lecture halls, and drawing-room politics rewarded the person who could perform calm while everyone else performed labor. Stillness reads as refinement because it implies you have the luxury to be unhurried, unflustered, unthreatened.

The subtext is sharper: volatility is for other people. If your features “move” too much, you’re not merely emotional, you’re suspect - immigrant, working-class, improperly educated, improperly governed. Physiognomy and etiquette blur into a polite kind of surveillance.

Holmes dresses this hierarchy as taste, but it functions as discipline. The quote flatters the reader into thinking composure is character, while quietly insisting that the right body language is proof of belonging.