Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

"Every pursuit is great when greatly pursued."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Life quotes.

"To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The life of the law has not been logic but experience."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"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."
-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

"It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Life quotes.

"There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Between two groups of men that want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds I see no remedy except force... It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Greatness is not in were we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind, and somtimes agaisnt it - but sail we must. And not drift, nor lie at anchor. "
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Listening quotes.

"Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Quotations quotes.

"Science is good furniture for one's upper chamber, if there is common sense below."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Stupidity often saves a man from going mad."
-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. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Friendship quotes.

"Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Life quotes.

"Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

"A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Age quotes.

"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."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Music quotes.

"Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Knowledge quotes.

"Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes in Truth quotes.

"Death tugs at my ear and says: 'Live, I am coming.'"
-Oliver Wendell Holmes