Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.

What a new face courage puts on everything. - Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.

Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He'll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Go on, fair Science; soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast; Her vulgar lingers formed a tree, But thou hast trained it to a post.

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?

War? War is an organized bore.

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.

Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.

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

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old they grow old because they quit playing.

There's nothing that keeps its youth, so far as I know, but a tree and truth.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being

A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

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 great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

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

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked

A mind stretched by a new ideanever shrinks back to its original proportions. ~

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.

if one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.

The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.

We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .

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

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.

An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.

The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.

If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.