Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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.

If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

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

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.

I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

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

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.

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.