Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.
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.
From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
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.
Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.
Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.
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.
We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it
take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip
the bottom out of their boat.
take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip
the bottom out of their boat.
The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.
I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.
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.
Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex - not that which never has divined it.
The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.
Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.
Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.