Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.

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

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about - you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.

The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

If wine tells truth - and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!

Systems die; instincts remain.

Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.

It's a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.

The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb'd in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one's way of taking a fact.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

But the word "right" is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified.

The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders.

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

To know is not less than to feel.

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

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.

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

The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.

What a new face courage puts on everything. - Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.