Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Men Quotations

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.

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

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings; This is the page whose letters shall be seen, Changed by the sun to words of living green; This is the scholar whose immortal penSpells the first lesson hunger taught to men; These are the lines that heaven-commanded Toil Shows on his deed, - the charter of the soil!

Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about-you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.

A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.

Man has will, but woman has her way.