Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes & Sayings

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young! — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Leaving the criminal law on one side, what is the difference between the liability under the mill acts or statutes authorizing a taking by eminent domain and the liability for what we call a wrongful conversion of property where restoration is out of the question. In both cases the party taking another man's property has to pay its fair value as assessed by a jury, and no more. What significance is there in calling one taking right and another wrong from the point of view of the law? — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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 birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science? — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A person of genius should marry a person of character. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creed, there is one thing I do not doubt and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan or campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Man has will, but woman has her way. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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 ... — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex - not that which never has divined it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Every idea is an incitement ... eloquence may set fire to reason. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings; This is the page whose letters shall be seen, Changed by the sun to words of living green; This is the scholar whose immortal penSpells the first lesson hunger taught to men; These are the lines that heaven-commanded Toil Shows on his deed, - the charter of the soil! — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

War? War is an organized bore. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

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

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A new untruth is better than an old truth. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. 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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.