Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

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!

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.

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.

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

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

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.

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

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.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

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

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

When in doubt, do it.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

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