Oliver Wendell Holmes

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
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

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have – Cincinnati sounds worse.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men – and the fools know it.
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

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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ‘consistent’.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Don’t be “consistent” but be simple true.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Knowledge like timber shouldn’t be mush use till they are seasoned.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
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

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Amen of nature is always a flower.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
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

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Have the courage to act instead of react.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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