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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.



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



  • Every idea is an incitement...Eloquence may set fire to reason.



  • 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 great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.



  • What a blessed thing it is that nature, when she invented, manufactured and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!



  • We must think things not words, or at least we words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.



  • A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.



  • Husband and wife come to look alike at last.



  • The Amen of Nature is always a flower.



  • Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.



  • A man must get a thing before he can forget it.



  • Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.



  • Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.



  • When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide when will happen tomorrow, I look back.



  • Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!



  • Friendship is the pleasing game of interchanging praise.



  • I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.



  • To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.



  • The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms.



  • Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.



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



  • Beware how you take away hope from another human being.



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



  • This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.



  • Faith implies the disbelief of a lesser face in favor of a greater.



  • We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.



  • The reward of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.



  • Systems die; instincts remain.



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



  • Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman.



  • 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.



  • The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.



  • Speak clearly, if you speak at all; Carve every word before you let it fall.



  • The longing for certainty...is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.



  • Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.



  • A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.



  • Happiness consists activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.



  • Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.



  • Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.



  • Talking is like playing on the harp, there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.



  • Every calling is great when greatly pursued.



  • I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late.



  • Most persons have died before they expired - 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.



  • When the style is fully formed, if it has a sweet undersong, we call it beautiful, and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.



  • Imitation is a necessity of human nature.



  • Apology - a desperate habit, and one that is rarely cured.



  • Have the courage to act instead of react.



  • If you wan to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.



  • Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.



  • A day's impact is better than a month of dead pull.



  • The man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severely unequalled, is almost sure to be a good - humored person.



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



  • Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.



  • A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure.



  • One unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above; Nor cracking pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.



  • Man has his will - but woman has her way.



  • Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.



  • Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.



  • The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.



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



  • Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.



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



  • Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock - sure of many things that were not so.



  • I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.



  • Life is a great bundle of little things.



  • An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.



  • The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.



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



  • Faith, as an intellectual state, is self - reliance.



  • Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell him.



  • Apology is only egotism wrong side out.



  • A new untruth is better than an old truth.



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



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



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



  • A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb uppermost, and the column of self - valuation is all the time going up and down.



  • Thou, oh my country, hast thy foolish ways, Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.



  • The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.



  • 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?



  • Logic is logic. That's all I say.



  • Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.



  • Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right- it holds my golden time!



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



  • The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.



  • The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.



  • Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.



  • A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.



  • I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.



  • Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.



  • When in doubt, do it.



  • Life is a romantic business, but you have to make the romance.



  • A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.



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