Words matter. These are the best Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
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.
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.
We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.
Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
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.
The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
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.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
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?
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
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.
What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
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.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
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.
Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn’t got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
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.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else – very rarely to those who say to themselves, ‘Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!’.
The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
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?
Have the courage to act instead of react.
It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.