Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Quotes

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

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

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

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

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

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

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

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way – and the fools know it.

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

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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.

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

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

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

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!

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

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

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

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?

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

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

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

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

Don’t you stay at home of evenings? Don’t you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

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

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

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

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

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.