Famous Quotes

Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

• A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
• 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!
• A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
• A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
• A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
• A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
• A new untruth is better than an old truth.
• 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.
• Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
• Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
• But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
• Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.
• 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.
• 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 library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
• 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.
• Have the courage to act instead of react.
• 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.
• I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
• 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!
• If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
• 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.
• It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
• It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.
• It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
• Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
• Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
• Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
• 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.
• Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
• Men do not quit playing because they grow old they grow old because they quit playing.
• Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
• Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
• Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
• Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
• Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
• Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
• Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
• The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
• The Amen of nature is always a flower.
• The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
• The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
• The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.