Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

If wine tells truth - and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Imitation is a necessity of human nature.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.

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

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Most people have died before they expire; 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.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.

What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.

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

Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.

Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one's way of taking a fact.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society

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

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.

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

I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

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

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.

We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age.

But the word "right" is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified.

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.