Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
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.
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.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
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.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.
Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
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.
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.
To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman.
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.
The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.
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.
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
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.
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.
