Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
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.
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.
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?
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
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?
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
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.
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
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.
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.
The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
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.
For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.
