Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes - Page 2

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

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

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

The best servant does his work unseen.

You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

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

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

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.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.

And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.

Science is the topography of ignorance.