Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes | GloryQuotes

Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes About Life

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes About Honesty

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

More Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

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

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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?

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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!

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

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

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Browse 92 quotes attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, listed in the source data as a American Writer, organized around themes such as Life, Honesty, Time. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.