Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

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

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

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

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.

When a man holds his tongue it does not signify much. But when a woman dispenses with the office of the mighty member, when she sheathed her natural weapon at a trying moment, it means that she trusts to still more formidable enginery; to tears it may be, a solvent more powerful than that with which Hannibal softened the alpine rocks.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

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.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

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

The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.

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

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

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

On every stem, on every leaf,... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.

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.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

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

Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace.

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

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

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

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.

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.

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

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

War? War is an organized bore.

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

We must think things not 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.

You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.

Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes.

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

The noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.