Quotes By Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

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

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

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

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.

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

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.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

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.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

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

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

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

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

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

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

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.