Top 90 Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Have the courage to act instead of react.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Veteran's Day Quotes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Featured in: Journey Quotes

3. “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Featured in: Communication Quotes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

6. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

8. “Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

9. “Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

11. “Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

12. “A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

13. “It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

14. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

17. “Man has his will, but woman has her way.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

18. “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

19. “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

20. “Nothing is so common as the desire to be remarkable.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Featured in: Desire Quotes

21. “A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

22. “A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

24. “Beware how you take away hope from another human being.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

25. “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

26. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

27. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

30. “The Amen of nature is always a flower.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Featured in: Bullying Quotes

32. “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?”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

33. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

34. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

36. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

37. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

42. “Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way – and the fools know it.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

44. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

45. “Love prefers twilight to daylight.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

46. “The best servant does his work unseen.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

47. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

48. “You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

49. “Nothing is more common than the wish to be remarkable”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

50. “Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes