Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes (205 Quotes)

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

The flowering moments of the mind Drop half their petals in our speech.

Man has his will - but woman has her way.

The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Old time, in whose banks we deposit our notes, Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats He keeps all his customers still in arrears By lending them minutes and charging them years

Now Landlord Porter, grave, concise, severe, Master, nay, monarch in his proper sphere, Though to belles-lettres he pretended not, Lived close to Harvard, so knew what was what

The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.

The hat is the ultimum moriens of respectability.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

Husband and wife come to look alike at last.

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

It shall be a blessing, my little maid!

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks.

He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.

Wake in our breast the living fires, The holy faith that warmed our sires Thy hand hath made our nation free To die for her is serving Thee.

Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

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

When the last reader reads no more.

The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.

Little I ask my wants are few, I only want a hut of stone, (A very plain brownstone will do,) That I may call my own.

Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.

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.

Lean, hungry, savage anti-everythings. A modest Request.

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

The freeman casting with unpurchased hand The vote that shakes the turrets of the land.

People can be divided into two classes those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn't it done the other way.

'T is the heart's current lends the cup its glow, Whate'er the fountain whence the draught may flow.

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

Where go the poet's lines Answer, ye evening tapers Ye auburn locks, ye golden curls, Speak from your folded papers.

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be ... may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand. And so beyond the vision of battling races and an impoverished earth, I catch a dreaming glimpse of peace.

Thine eye was on the censer, And not the hand that bore it.

You hear that boy laughingyou think he's all fun But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done The children laugh loud as they troop to his call, And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

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.

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

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.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

Oh for one hour of youthful joy!

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.

A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.