Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

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.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

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!'.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

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.

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

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.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

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?

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.

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

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.

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

Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

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

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

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

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.

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?

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.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

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

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

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

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

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

Don't be 'consistent', but be simply true.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

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

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

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.

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

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.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.

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

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.