Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes on World (7 Quotes)

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.

The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship. Observe, I am talking about minds. I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason but on the other hand, that the brain runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question.

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

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

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

For I say unto you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone when you have felt around you are a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and despair have trusted to your own unshaken will then only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought the subtle rapture of postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. And if this joy should not be yours, still it is only thus you can know that you have done what lay in you to do can say that you have lived, and be ready for the end.

It is the folly of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.