Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

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

“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.”

“Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”

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

“[Science is] piecemeal revelation.”

“The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.”

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

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

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

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

“The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.”

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

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

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

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

“The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.”

“Cupid "the little greatest enemy."”

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

“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?”

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

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

“Beware how you take away hope from any human being.”

“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.”

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

“The year is getting to feel rich, for his golden fruits are ripening fast, and he has a large balance in the barns, which are his banks. The members of his family have found out that he is well to do in the world. September is dressing herself in show of dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand reception.”

“Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.”

“Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.”

“Don't be 'consistent,' but be simply true.”

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

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

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.”

“America is the only place where man is full-grown!”

“Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.”

“Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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!'.”

“I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”

“A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.”

“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.”

“The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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