Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

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.

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

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

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

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.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

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!

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.