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.

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

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

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.

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!

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

I don’t generally feel anything until noon, then it’s time for my nap.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

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

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men – and the fools know it.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.

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.

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

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

Have the courage to act instead of react.

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

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

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

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

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one’s own moral aesthetic preferences.

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

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

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?

Every idea is an incitement… Eloquence may set fire to reason.

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

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

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.

Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.

When in doubt, do it.

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.

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

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

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

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

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

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

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

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

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

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

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

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

Don’t be “consistent” but be simple true.

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

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.

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

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

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

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

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Knowledge like timber shouldn’t be mush use till they are seasoned.

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

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

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

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

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.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

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

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

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