Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes - Page 2

Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Man has will, but woman has her way.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.

Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

A person of genius should marry a person of character.

Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.

While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.