Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

A man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

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

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

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

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving—we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

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.

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

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

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

The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.

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.

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

Beware how you take away hope from another human being

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

Man has his will, but woman has her way.

Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

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

A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.

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

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

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

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

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.

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

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

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

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.

Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

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

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

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

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

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

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

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.

Why can’t somebody give us a list of things everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of the things that everybody says but nobody thinks?

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

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

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.

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.

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

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

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

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1861

The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.

Nothing is more common than the wish to be remarkable

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.

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.

Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

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

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

Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

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.

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

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

Yet in opinions look not always back,-- Your wake is nothing, mind the coming track; Leave what you've done for what you have to do; Don't be "consistent," but be simply true.

Life transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

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

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!

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

There's nothing that keeps its youth, so far as I know, but a tree and truth.

Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

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

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

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.

Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.

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

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

Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats; He keeps all his customers still in arrears By lending them minutes and charging them years.

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

What lies behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us and ahead of us.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.

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.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

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.

The rational study of law is still to a large extent the study of history. History must be a part of the study, because without it we cannot know the precise scope of rules which it is our business to know.

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.

For I say to you in all the sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone – when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will – then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought – the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!