Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

The best servant does his work unseen.

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

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?

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

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Man has his will, but woman has her way.

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

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.

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

Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.

See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

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.

You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.

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

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

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

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.

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!

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

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

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

And if I should live to beThe last leaf upon the treeIn the spring,Let them smile, as I do now,At the old forsaken boughWhere I cling.

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

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

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

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

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them...

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.

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

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

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.

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.

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 books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.

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

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

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

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

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

Science is the topography of ignorance.

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

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

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

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

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?

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

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

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

I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.

Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

Cupid "the little greatest enemy."

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.