Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.

Logic is logic. That's all I say.

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.

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

A sick man that gets talking about himself a woman that gets talking about her baby and an author that begins reading out of his own book never know when to stop.

Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!

A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.

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

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

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

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.

Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.

Friendship is the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye the more light you pour upon it the more it will contract.

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

Man has his will - but woman has her way.

Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.

rouble creates a capacity to handle it.

A man is a kind of inverted thermometer the bulb uppermost and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

Apology - a desperate habit and one that is rarely cured.

The man who thinks his wife his baby his house his horse his dog and himself severely unequalled is almost sure to be a good-humored person.

Husband and wife come to look alike at last.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

A day's impact is better than a month of dead pull.

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms.

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.

Systems die instincts remain.

Faith implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater.

The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.

So long as the body is affected through the mind no audacious device even of the most manifestly dishonest character can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield to it an implicit or even a partial faith.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

A general flavour of mild decay but nothing local as one may say.

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

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

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

A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen - no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.

For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until by and by out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.

Youth fades love droops the leaves of friendship fall A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

Talking is like playing on the harp there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

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

Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.

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.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

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

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. 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 neighbour 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 neighbour you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

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

Speak clearly if you speak at all Carve every word before you let it fall.

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

Most persons have died before they expired - died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

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

Pick my left pocket of its silver dime but spare the right-it holds my golden time!

Take your needle my child and work at your pattern it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like embroidery.

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.

Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.

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

I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late.