Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes