Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.

The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb'd in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.

Every idea is an incitement ... eloquence may set fire to reason.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say 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.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.

A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.

Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe ... that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market ... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.

To know is not less than to feel.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.

The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.

Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it.

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

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

The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.

I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creed, there is one thing I do not doubt and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan or campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.

And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound.

Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.

Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.

The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders.

If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. Its my job.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year
in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life
there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

A person of genius should marry a person of character.

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age.

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

War? War is an organized bore.

The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.

Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.

If one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. 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.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

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.

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.