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Who really said it

Secret of the Universe: A Strong Smell of Turpentine Prevails Throughout

Not Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — his father, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 1809–1894 · physician, poet & Harvard anatomy professor
Disputed Free to reuse

The line is genuine, but it belongs to the father, not the Supreme Court son. Holmes Sr. told the story of inhaling ether in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard on 29 June 1870, printed as Mechanism in Thought and Morals (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1871). On pages 46–47 he reports the “all-embracing truth” he staggered to his desk to write down: “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.” The words “Secret of the Universe” are the framing of later retellings, not Holmes’s own.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Secret of the Universe: A Strong Smell of Turpentine Prevails Throughout” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., "Mechanism in Thought and Morals," address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Harvard University, 29 June 1870 (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1871), 46–47. Not Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Supreme Court justice. · Verbatim: “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”

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Provenance

The primary source

Work
Mechanism in Thought and Morals
Occasion
Address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Harvard University, 29 June 1870
First book edition
Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1871 — the passage at pages 46–47
Author
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. — not Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.” Pages 46–47, 1871 edition

The revelation is set in italics in the original printing. Note what is not there: Holmes never writes the phrase “Secret of the Universe” — that wrapper comes from later retellings. He introduces the passage by warning that its moral bears on “the significance of general formulae when looked at in certain exalted mental conditions.”

Scanned first book edition, 1871
Read pages 46–47 in the Internet Archive scan
Quote Investigator’s chronology of the turpentine anecdote

How we checked

  • Quote Investigator is the anchor: it traces Bertrand Russell’s 1945 “smell of petroleum” anecdote back to an address Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. gave to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society on 29 June 1870, and lays out the intervening variants of 1800, 1896, 1940, 1941 and 2007 — read the investigation.
  • We then read the book itself rather than relying on a summary. In the Internet Archive’s scan of the 1871 James R. Osgood & Co. edition, the ether passage runs across pages 46–47 and ends with the italicised line “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.” — see the pages.
  • Wikiquote files the line under Holmes Sr., cited to the same 1870 Phi Beta Kappa address — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. on Wikiquote. Its page for the justice carries a long Misattributed list of lines that are really his father’s — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. on Wikiquote.
  • The father was a physician and Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard Medical School, and the justice was his eldest son — Wikipedia’s biography, which also lists Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871) among his medical and psychological studies.
Public domain

The address was delivered on 29 June 1870 and published in book form by James R. Osgood & Co. of Boston in 1871 — far earlier than the 1931 United States copyright threshold — so the sentence and the passage around it are in the public domain in the US. Both the Internet Archive scan and the National Library of Medicine’s copy of the 1877 fourth edition are freely readable in full. Bertrand Russell’s 1945 rewording is a separate, still-in-copyright text, quoted here only as evidence of the misattribution.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Four things the popular version gets wrong

This is an unusually layered case: the sentence is real and primary-sourced, but almost everything attached to it in circulation has slipped — the man, the drug, the noun, and even the famous opening words.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Supreme Court justice

The credit to the justice is a traceable newspaper error. Quote Investigator documents a Milwaukee Journal column of 19 December 1941, “Wisecracks of the Famous,” which opens “The late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes underwent a minor operation a few years before his death” and then runs the anecdote. The ether experiment was his father’s — a physician, not a jurist.

“Oh, Lord, what a Stench!” 1940

The version that 1941 column inherited had already lost the original sentence. Quote Investigator traces it to a May 1940 Reader’s Digest item credited to Bob Davis in the New York Sun, in which Holmes instead writes “Oh, Lord, what a Stench!”

William James, via Bertrand Russell 1945

In A History of Western Philosophy (1945) Russell tells it as a man James described who got the experience from laughing-gas and wrote “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.” Quote Investigator reproduces that passage and concludes it is a metamorphosed retelling of Holmes Sr. — while allowing that two people could conceivably have reported oddly similar experiences.

“Secret of the Universe:” framing

Holmes never wrote that phrase beside the line. In the 1871 book he calls it “the one great truth which underlies all human experience” and then gives the words themselves. “Secret of the universe” belongs to the retellings — it is how Russell frames it in 1945 — and survives today as a headline wrapper around the real sentence, which is simply: A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.

The true text, in the author’s own book: “The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Mechanism in Thought and Morals, 1871, pages 46–47.

Context

Why the joke works

Holmes Sr. was not mocking mysticism from the outside. He was one of the first American doctors to take ether seriously, and he ran the experiment on himself deliberately — pen and paper waiting, determined to catch the revelation before it evaporated. The setup is a scientist’s, and so is the punchline.

And the punchline lands on himself. Turpentine was a smell of the nineteenth-century sickroom and dissecting room; the transcendent truth the archangel brought back was a doctor noticing that his own study reeked of a doctor’s chemicals. Holmes tells it inside an argument that thought has a mechanism — that a “slight material cause” can remake what feels, from within, like insight.

Children may smile; the wise will ponder.

How the story mutated on its way to Bertrand Russell

Holmes printed a companion case immediately afterwards: Sir Humphry Davy, in his 1800 nitrous-oxide researches, announcing “with the most intense belief and prophetic manner” that nothing exists but thoughts. Holmes says he had forgotten Davy’s report when he recorded his own.

From there the anecdote drifted. Quote Investigator tracks an 1896 medical-journal retelling that swapped ether for chloroform and the wording to “A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole”; a 1940 Reader’s Digest version in which the revelation is “Oh, Lord, what a Stench!”; a 1941 newspaper column that handed the whole thing to the Supreme Court justice; and Bertrand Russell’s 1945 A History of Western Philosophy, where it becomes an anonymous man on laughing gas, described by William James, who writes “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.” Russell’s is the version most people have met.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Doubt Humility

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: “A Strong Smell of Turpentine Prevails Throughout”quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: traces Russell’s 1945 “petroleum” version back to Holmes Sr.’s 1870 address, with the 1800, 1896, 1940, 1941 and 2007 variants in order.
Mechanism in Thought and Morals (Osgood, 1871) — full scanarchive.org

The first book edition of the Phi Beta Kappa address. The ether passage and the turpentine sentence sit on pages 46–47.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carries the turpentine line among his sourced quotations, cited to the 1870 Phi Beta Kappa address.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Its Misattributed section shows how routinely the father’s lines get reassigned to the justice — the same mechanism that produced this credit.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Life dates (1809–1894), his Parkman Professorship at Harvard Medical School, and Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871) among his medical and psychological studies.
Mechanism in Thought and Morals, 4th ed. (1877)collections.nlm.nih.gov

The National Library of Medicine’s freely viewable public-domain copy of the address, with page images, PDF and OCR text.

The man who actually wrote it

About Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

1809–1894 · American physician, poet & essayist; Parkman Professor of Anatomy at Harvard

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was a Boston physician, poet and essayist, and Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard Medical School, where he also served as dean. He is best remembered for The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and for arguing that doctors themselves carried puerperal fever between patients — and he was an early, enthusiastic experimenter with ether, which is exactly the setting of this line. His eldest son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., became the Supreme Court justice, and the two are confused constantly.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mechanism in Thought and Morals: An Address Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 29, 1870 (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1871), 46–47. Quote Investigator cites the same passage at the same pages in the 1879 Houghton, Osgood printing.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Secret of the Universe: A Strong Smell of Turpentine Prevails Throughout’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/secret-of-the-universe-a-strong-smell-of-turpentine/

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