Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.

Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.

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.

You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.

America is the only place where man is full-grown!

A mind stretched by a new idea
never shrinks back to its original proportions.
~

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

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.

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

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.

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.

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
Georgius Secundus was then alive,
Snuffy old drone from the German hive.

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!

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.

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.

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.