Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

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

Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

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

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

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

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

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

Man has his will, but woman has her way.

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.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

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

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.

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them...

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?

Have the courage to act instead of react.

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

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

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.

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?

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

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

Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

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

The year is getting to feel rich, for his golden fruits are ripening fast, and he has a large balance in the barns, which are his banks. The members of his family have found out that he is well to do in the world. September is dressing herself in show of dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand reception.

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

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.

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.

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

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

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.

Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.

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

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

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

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

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

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

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

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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

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.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

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

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.