Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Memory is a net: one that 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
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?
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
Oliver Wendell Holmes