Top 216 Quotes & Sayings by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - Page 3

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.

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

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.

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

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age.

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

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

Systems die; instincts remain.

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.

Carve every word before you let it fall.

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.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

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

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.

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

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.

Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!

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.

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

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.

Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.

A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.

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.

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.

But the word "right" is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified.

The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

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 have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.

The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

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

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.

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.

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.

What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man's learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

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

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

When a man holds his tongue it does not signify much. But when a woman dispenses with the office of the mighty member, when she sheathed her natural weapon at a trying moment, it means that she trusts to still more formidable enginery; to tears it may be, a solvent more powerful than that with which Hannibal softened the alpine rocks.

Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.

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.

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

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

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.

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

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

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