Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr Quotations

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A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.
Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
Carve every word before you let it fall.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
Don't be 'consistent,' but be simply true.
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.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.
Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas - and... no general idea is worth a damn.
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
To be seventy years young is sometimes for more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.