Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes - Page 3

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

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

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

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

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

Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.

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

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

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

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man ... is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.

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