Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

America is the only place where man is full-grown!

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

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

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

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

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

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

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.

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

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

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

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else - very rarely to those who say to themselves, 'Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!'.

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

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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?

What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

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

We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

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

The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.

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.

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.

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

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

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them...

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.