Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.

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

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man's learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green.

I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.

A person of genius should marry a person of character.

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.

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

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.

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

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

Systems die; instincts remain.

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

It's a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.

As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

You hear that boy laughing?you think he's all fun; But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done; The children laugh loud as they troop to his call, And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.

A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

Man has will, but woman has her way.

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

Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about - you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.

Our dead brothers and sisters still live for us and bid us think of life, not death-of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.