Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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.

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

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.

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

Every idea is an incitement... Eloquence may set fire to reason.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

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

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

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.

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

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

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

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

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

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

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

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

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

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

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

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

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

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.