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Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes


It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Death tugs at my ear and says: Live, I am coming.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Don't be consistent but be simple true.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Every idea is an incitement...Eloquence may set fire to reason.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Have the courage to act instead of react.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it holds my golden time!
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
When in doubt, do it.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
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 them.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
There's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes