Top 90 Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “Leverage is everything-don’t begin to pry until you’ve got the long arm on your side.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

52. “Yes, child of suffering, thou may’st well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

53. “Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn’t got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

54. “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 implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

55. “The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

56. “A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

57. “The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men – from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

58. “Don’t be ‘consistent,’ but be simply true.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

59. “To obtain a man’s opinion of you, make him mad.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

60. “The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

62. “Apology is only egotism wrong side out.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

63. “Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

64. “Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

65. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

67. “For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

68. “A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

69. “A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

70. “Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

71. “Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

72. “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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

74. “I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

75. “I like children; I like ’em, and I respect ’em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

76. “America is the only place where man is full-grown!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

77. “Cupid “the little greatest enemy.””

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

78. “Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

79. “What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

80. “Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have – Cincinnati sounds worse.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

81. “Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

82. “The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

83. “Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

84. “Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

85. “Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world – and unless we touch others, we’re out of touch with life.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

86. “Science is the topography of ignorance.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

87. “When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

88. “A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

89. “I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

90. “Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

91. “Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

92. “The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn’t worth a damn.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

93. “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?”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

94. “What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

95. “We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth’s dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight’s gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

96. “It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

97. “What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

98. “A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes