Top 216 Quotes & Sayings by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - Page 2

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

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

Most people have died before they expire; 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 noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.

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

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

A person of genius should marry a person of character.

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

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

We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Our dead brothers and sisters 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.

To know is not less than to feel.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. 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.

Man has will, but woman has her way.

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

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?

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

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

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

Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

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.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

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

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

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.

While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

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.

The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

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

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

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.

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

For him in vain the envious seasons roll Who bears eternal summer in his soul.

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.

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 with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it.

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.

It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.

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

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one's way of taking a fact.

For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.

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.