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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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
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Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
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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.
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It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
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The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
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A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
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Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
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Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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!
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.
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
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Have the courage to act instead of react.
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
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Every idea is an incitement... Eloquence may set fire to reason.
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
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
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
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
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
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes