Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes

Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

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.

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

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

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.

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

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

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

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

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

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

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

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

When in doubt, do it.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

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