Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

» I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

» Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

» Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

» Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

» Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

» Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

» Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

» This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

» The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

» A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

» Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

» The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

» Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

» He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.

» I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

» Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.

» Have the courage to act instead of react.

» Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

» Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

» The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

» If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

» Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

» The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

» Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

» The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

» Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

» The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

» The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

» Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.

» The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

» Every idea is an incitement... Eloquence may set fire to reason.

» When in doubt, do it.

» Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

» Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

» A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

» Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

» To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

» A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.

» Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

» Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

» Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

» Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.

» Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

» It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.

» Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

» The Amen of nature is always a flower.

» Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

» Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

» Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

» Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned.

» Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

» I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

» A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

» Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

» Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

» Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

» Love prefers twilight to daylight.

» The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

» Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

» Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

» A new untruth is better than an old truth.

» Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

» We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.

» One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

» Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

» I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.

» People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

» The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

» Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

» A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

» Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

» Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

» It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

» Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

» Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.

» But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

» Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

» Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

» If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

» Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

» It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

» It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

» The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

» A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

» To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

» Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

» Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

» Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

» To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

» The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

» A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

» Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

» The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

» Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

» Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

» Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

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Who Said: "We owe it to the flood victims of New Orleans to give them truthful answers as to why this event took place and to assure our citizens that tragedies like this will never happen again." Click To See

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