Holmes, Oliver Wendell quotes
1809-1894 American Author Wit PoetPeople who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Contradiction
Speak not too well of one who scarce will know himself transfigured in its roseate glow; Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true, remembering always he belongs to you; Deal with him as a truant, if you will, But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Brotherhood
A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Disasters
The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Democracy
What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Dullness
Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Elegance
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Change
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Critics and Criticism
In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Cooperation
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Controversy
Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Death and Dying
A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Death and Dying
Old books, you know well, are books of the world s youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Books - Reading
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man s upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Common Sense
... the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don t you know what that means? Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Controversy
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Conceit
The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Books - Reading
To have doubted one s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Doubt
What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Doctors
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Conventionality
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Books - Reading
Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Children
A child s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Children
Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Commonplace
A page of history is worth a pound of logic.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
History and Historians
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Flowers
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Faith
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Experts
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Freedom of Speech
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Facts
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
History and Historians
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Genius
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Genius
It s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Faith
This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Law and Lawyers
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Excuses
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Friends and Friendship
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Memory
Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Love
Knowledge like timber shouldn t be mush use till they are seasoned.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Knowledge
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Insanity
A moment s insight is sometimes worth a life s experience.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Insights
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Jokes and Jokers
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ideals and Idealism
A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ideas
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?
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Humankind
It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Loneliness
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Life and Living
I firmly believe that if the whole material medical could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the sea.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Medicine
Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Love
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Praise
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Language
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Language
To live is to function. That is all there is in living.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Life and Living
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Music
It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Life and Living
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ideas
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Kisses and Kissing
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Instinct
Man s mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ideas
I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Marriage
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ideas
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Opinions
Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Pollution
You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man, and to the man with special talents, this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time that the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Power
Our brains our seventy year clocks, the angel of life winds them up once and for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Mind
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Prejudice
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Perception
The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Tragedies
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Originality
And Silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Silence
The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn t worth a damn.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Soul
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Truth
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don t 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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Trouble
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Trust
Little-minded people s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Thoughts and Thinking
A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Soldier
Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Revolutions and Revolutionaries
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Thoughts and Thinking
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Retirement
Don t you stay at home of evenings? Don you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Retirement
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Speech
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Truth
The world s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Studying
How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Reputation
Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Rules
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Sin
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Stupidity
Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother s secret hope outlives them all.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Secrets
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Theory
God s plan made a hopeful beginning. But man spoiled his chances by sinning. We trust that the story will end in God s glory. But, at present, the other side s winning.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Sin
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Truth
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Thoughts and Thinking
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Truth
Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Society
People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Puns
Age, like distance lends a double charm.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Age and Aging
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Age and Aging
Beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Beauty
A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Age and Aging
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Advice
Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Advertising
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Action
Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can t sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ancestry
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Action
And when you stick on conversation s burrs, don t strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Conversation
The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Achievement
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Achievement
Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ancestry
Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
America
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Ability
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Fame
Man has will, but woman has her way.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Will and Will Power
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 the time in which it is used.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Words
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Work
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.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
World
The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Writers and Writing
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Youth
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Wisdom
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Vision