Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Don't be 'consistent,' but be simply true.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

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

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.

Carve every word before you let it fall.

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.