Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotations

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

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.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

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

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

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 best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

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.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

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

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

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

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

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.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

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

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

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

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.

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

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

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

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

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

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end.

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?

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.

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.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.

There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.

Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.

Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman.

Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.

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.

As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.

Systems die; instincts remain.

The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.

The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

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

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb'd in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.

On every stem, on every leaf,... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.

If wine tells truth - and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!

I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

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.

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.

But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.

And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

It's a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.