Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Man has his will, but woman has her way.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

“The best servant does his work unseen.”