Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. on Wise Famous Quotes.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

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

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men
from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

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.

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

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

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

Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

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

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

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

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

Man has his will, but woman has her way.

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Speak clearly if you speak at all, carve every word before you let it fall.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

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.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

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

Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!

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

Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good

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

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of the things that everybody says but nobody thinks?

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

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

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

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.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

Nothing is more common than the wish to be remarkable

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

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.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.

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.

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.

Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being

Simple people ... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

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

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.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.