Oliver Wendell Holmes's Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

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

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

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!

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

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

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

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.

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

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

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

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

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.

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

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

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

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.

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!

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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.

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

When in doubt, do it.

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

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

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