Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Age, like distance lends a double charm.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Speak not too well of one who scarce will know himself transfigured in its roseate glow; Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true, remembering always he belongs to you; Deal with him as a truant, if you will, But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

... the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don't you know what that means? Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

And when you stick on conversation's burrs, don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk about them.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn't it done the other way?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

To live is to function. That is all there is in living.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

I firmly believe that if the whole material medical could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the sea.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our brains our seventy year clocks, the angel of life winds them up once and for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man, and to the man with special talents, this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time that the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

And Silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

God's plan made a hopeful beginning. But man spoiled his chances by sinning. We trust that the story will end in God's glory. But, at present, the other side's winning.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes