Top 160 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

102. “It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference “the president” refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

103. “Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

104. “I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be – that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

105. “Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about-you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

106. “A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

107. “What a new face courage puts on everything. – Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

108. “The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb’d in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

109. “The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

110. “Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

111. “There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

114. “Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

115. “To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

116. “To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

117. “What I wouldn’t give to be seventy again!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

118. “Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

119. “Apologizing – a very desperate habit – one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

120. “Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

121. “There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

122. “There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

123. “While we’ve youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

124. “Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

125. “The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

126. “Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

127. “It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

128. “Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

129. “There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

130. “To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year – in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life – there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

131. “The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

132. “Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

133. “To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

134. “In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

135. “Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

136. “Blood is a destiny. One’s genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

137. “Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

138. “Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

139. “I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

140. “Who does not feel that Nansen’s account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

141. “The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

142. “Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

143. “Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

144. “One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

145. “Man has will, but woman has her way.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

146. “I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

147. “The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

148. “Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

149. “On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

150. “I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.