Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

Quotes

• 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.

• 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.

• Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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

• Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

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

• Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

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

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

• The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, "The medicines of the soul."

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

• The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.

• The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

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

• To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

• When in doubt, do it.

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

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

• Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

• The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.