Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

rouble creates a capacity to handle it.

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

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

Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Death twitches my ear. "Live " he says "I am coming".

Most persons have died before they expired - 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.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.

When in doubt do it.

A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure.

The life of the law has not been logic it has been experience.

Faith as an intellectual state is self-reliance.

Faith implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater.

The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.

Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.

The man who thinks his wife his baby his house his horse his dog and himself severely unequalled is almost sure to be a good-humored person.

Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!

Friendship is the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Except in cases of necessity which are rare leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies they are ready enough to tell him.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of we have a special face for each friend.

Share the passion and action of your time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

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.

One unquestioned text we read All doubt beyond all fear above Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.

Life is a romantic business but you have to make the romance.

Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.

Youth fades love droops the leaves of friendship fall A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Systems die instincts remain.

This is a court of law young man not a court of justice.

Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.

The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.

Life is action and passion therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself as against the saints who deny it.

Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.

Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.

Logic is logic. That's all I say.

Husband and wife come to look alike at last.

A general flavour of mild decay but nothing local as one may say.

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

A man must get a thing before he can forget it.

I should like to see any kind of a man distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

The AmenT of Nature is always a flower.

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

A day's impact is better than a month of dead pull.

Pick my left pocket of its silver dime but spare the right-it holds my golden time!