Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.

Don’t be ‘consistent,’ but be simply true.

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

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

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.

You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.

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.

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

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

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

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

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

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

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

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

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

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.

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.

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

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

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

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

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

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

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

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

Carve every word before you let it fall.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

Man’s mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

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

A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

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

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

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