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.
More Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.Oliver Wendell Holmes
The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas - and... no general idea is worth a damn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.
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
Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Based on Topics: People QuotesBased on Keywords: rudder, sermon, steer
Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.
Samuel Johnson
I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world.
Gordon Brown
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell