Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

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

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.

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.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.

Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace.

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.

For him in vain the envious seasons roll Who bears eternal summer in his soul.

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.

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

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

Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.

Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

Carve every word before you let it fall.

As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

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

Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.

But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

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

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society

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

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 person of genius should marry a person of character.

The noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.