Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes
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!
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes