Words matter. These are the best Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
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.
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.
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.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.
Every idea is an incitement… eloquence may set fire to reason.
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
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.
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.
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.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
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.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
