Top 160 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Featured in: Experience Quotes, Short Motivational Quotes, Lifelong Learning Quotes

2. “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

3. “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

4. “Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

5. “Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

6. “I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

7. “Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

8. “This is a court of law, not a court of justice.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

9. “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

10. “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

11. “Longevity is having a chronic disease – and taking care of it.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

12. “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

13. “Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

14. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

15. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

16. “The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

17. “Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

18. “Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

19. “The noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

20. “It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

21. “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

22. “Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

24. “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

25. “Lord, bid war’s trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Featured in: Veteran's Day Quotes

26. “The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

27. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

28. “To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

29. “Carve every word before you let it fall.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

30. “Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase “due process of law” there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

31. “If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

32. “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

33. “Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

34. “I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

35. “The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

36. “Certitude is not the test of certainty.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

37. “Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

38. “We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Featured in: Real Quotes

39. “And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

40. “The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

41. “There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

42. “No generalization is wholly true – not even this one.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

43. “Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

44. “A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

45. “War? War is an organized bore.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

46. “The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

47. “There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul’s garden, which I love to have watered once a week.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

48. “Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

49. “To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

50. “Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.