Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

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

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

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.

Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

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

Have the courage to act instead of react.

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.

When in doubt, do it.

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

Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.

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

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

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

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

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.

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

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

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

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.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

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