Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

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

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

The best servant does his work unseen.

You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else - very rarely to those who say to themselves, 'Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!'.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

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.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

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.

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

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man ... is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.

The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

Yes, child of suffering, thou may'st well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor!

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.