Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotations

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

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

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

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

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

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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

Have the courage to act instead of react.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

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

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.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Every idea is an incitement...Eloquence may set fire to reason.

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

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

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.

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

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

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

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

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

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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!

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

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

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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!'.

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

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

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

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!

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Life is a great bundle of little things

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics of the chips that were left.

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our father's have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a large part than what we suspect of what we think.

Old time, in whose banks we deposit our notes, Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats; He keeps all his customers still in arrears By lending them minutes and charging them years

What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.

Husband and wife come to look alike at last

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Our brains our seventy year clocks, the angel of life winds them up once and for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by

With all humility, I think, ''Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.'' Infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

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

Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

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.

And when you stick on conversation's burrs, don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.

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

The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.

Now Landlord Porter, grave, concise, severe, Master, nay, monarch in his proper sphere, Though to belles-lettres he pretended not, Lived close to Harvard, so knew what was what

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.

The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.

Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death / of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn't it done the other way?

Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.

Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

A good and true woman is said to resemble a Cremona fiddle: age but increases its worth and sweetens its tone