Top 160 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

52. “Systems die; instincts remain.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

54. “Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

55. “Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

56. “Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

57. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

58. “The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

59. “If you don’t know what you want, you will probably never get it.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

60. “Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

61. “Old age is fifteen years older than I am.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

62. “The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

63. “Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

64. “Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

65. “The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one’s powers towards some great end.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

66. “To know is not less than to feel.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

67. “History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

68. “I despise making the most of one’s time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

69. “General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

71. “The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

72. “Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

73. “But the word “right” is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

74. “Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

75. “But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

77. “Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our dredges.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

78. “The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

79. “The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

80. “Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

81. “The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

82. “To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

83. “A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

84. “If wine tells truth – and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

85. “The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

86. “I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

87. “It’s a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

88. “The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

89. “Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

90. “Eloquence may set fire to reason.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

91. “There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man’s learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

92. “Imitation is a necessity of human nature.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

93. “Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He’ll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

94. “But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

95. “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

96. “Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

97. “We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

98. “If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

100. “The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one’s way of taking a fact.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.