About Author : Oliver , a Calvinist clergyman, avid historian, author of Annals of America and of unnotable poetry, and his second wife, Sarah Wendell, of a prominent New York family. Through her, Dr. Holmes was descended from Massachusetts Governors Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet and his wife, Dudley’s daughter, Anne Bradstreet, the first published American female poet. In 1840, Holmes married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of the Hon. Charles Jackson , formerly Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes and Sayings
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
One’s mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber if he has common sense on the ground floor.
If I were dying my last words would be Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
To be years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be years old.
The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand as in what direction you are moving.
Life is action and passion therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
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.
Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.
Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get at truth.
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days no greeting like his welcome no homage like his praise.
It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.
A person’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one we lock him up.
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
People can be divided into two classes those who go ahead and do something and those who sit still and inquire ‘Why wasn’t it done the other way’.
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
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.
To obtain a man’s opinion of you make him mad.
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors except those of apothecaries.
Where we love is home home that our feet may leave but not our hearts.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Man has his will – but woman has her way.
No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul it takes one that knows it well parent child brother sister intimate.
Speak clearly if you speak at all carve every word before you let it fall.
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.
There’s nothing that keeps its youth So far as I know but a tree and truth.
A thought is often original though you have uttered it a hundred times.
Life is a fatal complaint and an eminently contagious one.
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.
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. Except in cases of necessity which are rare leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies they are ready enough to tell them.
The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.
A word is not a crystal transparent and unchanging 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.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it the more it will contract.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.