Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes - Page 7

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

It's a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.

Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.

The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb'd in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.

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

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our dredges.