Writer · American · 1809 – 1894 · 92 quotes
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Writer · American · 1809 – 1894
Every idea is an incitement... Eloquence may set fire to reason.
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
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.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Have the courage to act instead of react.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
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.
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
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!
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.
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.
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
When in doubt, do it.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
