Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

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 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.

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

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

Cupid "the little greatest enemy."

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

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 library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

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

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

The best servant does his work unseen.

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

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else - very rarely to those who say to themselves, 'Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!'.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

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.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

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.

The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

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

Yes, child of suffering, thou may'st well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor!

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.

Leverage is everything-don't begin to pry until you've got the long arm on your side.

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

See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

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

There's nothing that keeps its youth, so far as I know, but a tree and truth.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being

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

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, 'The medicines of the soul.