Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Oliver Wendell Holmes
Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Oliver Wendell Holmes quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Every library should try to complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from menfrom mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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, Sr.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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?
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.Georgius Secundus was then alive,
Snuffy old drone from the German hive. — Oliver Wendell Holmes
The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Man has will, but woman has her way.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The best servant does his work unseen.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Eloquence may set fire to reason.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A mind stretched by a new ideanever shrinks back to its original proportions.
~ — Oliver Wendell Holmes
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Go on, fair Science; soon to theeShall Nature yield her idle boast;
Her vulgar lingers formed a tree,
But thou hast trained it to a post. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Leverage is everything-don't begin to pry until you've got the long arm on your side.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
If one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
This is a court of law, not a court of justice.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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, Sr.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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, Sr.
For him in vain the envious seasons rollWho bears eternal summer in his soul. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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, Sr.
To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Every idea is an incitement ... eloquence may set fire to reason.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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?
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Reason means truth and those who are not governed by ittake the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip
the bottom out of their boat. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one's way of taking a fact.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Nothing is more common than the wish to be remarkable
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Science is the topography of ignorance.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Yes, child of suffering, thou may'st well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor!
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.