Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - Page 2

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr..

Last updated on April 22, 2025.

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

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!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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!'.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Don't be 'consistent', but be simply true.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.