Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.

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

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

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!

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

The year is getting to feel rich, for his golden fruits are ripening fast, and he has a large balance in the barns, which are his banks. The members of his family have found out that he is well to do in the world. September is dressing herself in show of dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand reception.

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

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.

Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

The best servant does his work unseen.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.

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

Cupid "the little greatest enemy."

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Man has his will, but woman has her way.

You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

Leverage is everything-don't begin to pry until you've got the long arm on your side.

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

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.