Oliver Wendell Holmes quotes
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To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Have the courage to act instead of react.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Science is the topography of ignorance.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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 the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Don't be 'consistent,' but be simply true.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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?
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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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!
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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The Amen of nature is always a flower.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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?
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Man has his will, but woman has her way.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Love prefers twilight to daylight.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
The best servant does his work unseen.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades! Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,-- Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive,-- Snuffy old drone from the German hive.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Cupid "the little greatest enemy."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man ... is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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Yes, child of suffering, thou may'st well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor!
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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?
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes -
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The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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