Oliver Wendell Holmes

Youth fades love droops the leaves of friendship fall A mothers secret hope outlives them all.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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.

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

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

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

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 great thing in the world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

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.

I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

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

All of us love companionship and sympathy some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.

I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.

The great thing in the world isnt so much where we stand. As in what direction we are moving.

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

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

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.

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

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging them to bring out their music.

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.

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.

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

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

The world's great men have not commonly been scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

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.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

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

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

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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

In walking the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.

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.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

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

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, One Nation evermore!

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

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.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

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.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.

If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body

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

Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

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.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

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

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.

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

Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured.

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.

A man's mind stretched by a new idea, can never go back to its original dimensions.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

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

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?

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

Apologizing a very desperate habit one that is rarely cured.

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.