Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

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.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

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.

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.

Leverage is everything-don't begin to pry until you've got the long arm on your side.

For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.

See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.

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.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

Imitation is a necessity of human nature.

The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.

What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.

We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades! Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,-- Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive,-- Snuffy old drone from the German hive.

America is the only place where man is full-grown!

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.