Best 104 quotes of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. on MyQuotes

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

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!

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

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

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.

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

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

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.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

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

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.

Cupid "the little greatest enemy.

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

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

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?

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

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

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else - very rarely to those who say to themselves, 'Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!'.

For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

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.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.

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.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

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.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.

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

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

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

Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face.

Leverage is everything-don't begin to pry until you've got the long arm on your side.

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

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

Man has his will, but woman has her way.

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

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.

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

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.

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades! Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,-- Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!

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.

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.