Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

Imitation is a necessity of human nature.

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.

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.

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

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.

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

I detest a man who knows that he knows.

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

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.

Man has will, but woman has her way.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

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

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.

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.

War? War is an organized bore.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

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.

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.

Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about-you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

If wine tells truth - and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!

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.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

Every idea is an incitement ... eloquence may set fire to reason.

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.

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

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

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.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

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.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.

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.

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

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

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.

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

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.

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!

The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

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

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.

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.

For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

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

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.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

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

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.

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

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.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.