Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

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

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

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

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

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

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

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

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.

Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

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

For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.

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

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

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

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

Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.

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

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.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

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.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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

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

Man has will, but woman has her way.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

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

Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

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

It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

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

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

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.

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

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

To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman.

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

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.

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

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 time in which it is used.