Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

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

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

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

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

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

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

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

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

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

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.

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

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

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

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.

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.

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

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

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

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.

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

Carve every word before you let it fall.

Cupid "the little greatest enemy."

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

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

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.

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

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

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

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

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.