Oliver Wendell Holmes – 41 Quotes

41 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Have the courage to act instead of react.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

– 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

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

– 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

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

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Don’t you stay at home of evenings? Don’t you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

– 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

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

– 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

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.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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!

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

– 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

Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes