Quotes by
Oliver W. Holmes Sr. |
1809-1894 , American writer
American physician, writer, poet, and the father of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.In his time, he was considered the most learned man in US.
| 56 quotes | 1,802 visits |
Quotations
| • | Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, and the fools know it. 13 |
| • | Have the courage to act instead of react. 8 |
| • | Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. 6 |
| • | The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. 5 |
| • | Leverage is everything; don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side. 5 |
| • | Science is the topography of ignorance. 5 |
| • | To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. 5 |
| • | 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. 4 |
| • | Every calling is great when greatly pursued. 4 |
| • | Man has his will, but woman has her way! 4 |
| • | The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. 4 |
| • | To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad. 4 |
| • | If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity. 3 |
| • | Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else – very rarely to those who say to themselves, “Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!”. 3 |
| • | Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth. 3 |
| • | The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer. 3 |
| • | Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers. 3 |
| • | Beware how you take away hope from any human being. |
| • | He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself. |
| • | Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. |
| • | The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the closer it contracts. |
| • | A child’s education should begin at least 100 years before he was born. |
| • | 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 a life worth living. |
| • | 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”. |
| • | A man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Death tugs at my ear and says, “Live. I am coming”. |
| • | A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience. |
| • | Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. |
| • | The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city. |
| • | Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used, till they are seasoned. |
| • | Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. |
| • | Be polite and generous, but don’t undervalue yourself. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have: Cincinnati sounds worse. |
| • | A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time. |
| • | 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? |
| • | 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. |
| • | Stupidity often saves a man from going mad. |
| • | Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Some people are so heavenly minded, that they are no earthly good. |
| • | Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall. |
| • | The best servant does his work unseen. |
| • | A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. |
| • | It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. |
| • | The Amen of nature is always a flower. |
| • | Apology is only egotism wrong side out. |
| • | Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite. |
| • | Love prefers twilight to daylight. |
| • | A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend. |
| • | 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. |
