Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

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

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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!

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

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

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

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.

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.

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

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

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.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

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.

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.

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.

I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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