Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes (205 Quotes)


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

    The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb.

    Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.

    Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

    They walked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the lines of box, breathing its fragrance of eternity for this is one of the odors which carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past if we ever lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there was box growing on it.




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


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

    I know it is a sin For me to sit and grin At him here But the old three-cornered hat, And the breeches, and all that, Are so queer.

    Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while Before they begin to decay.

    Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.

    O Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun, We can never forget that our hearts have been one....


    Each of us has to work out his salvation in his own way. The most that another can do is to be able to give a helping hand.

    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!

    Life is real, life is earnest,
    And the shell is not its pen -
    "Egg thou art, and egg remainest"
    Was not spoken of the hen.

    Feels the same comfort while his acrid words Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds.



    Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.


    The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

    I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

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


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




    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.





    A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

    People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

    Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

    The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.


    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.

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

    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.

    To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

    Yes, child of suffering, thou mayst well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor.

    To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

    the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don't you know what that means Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it.


    I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.


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