Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

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.

A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. 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.

The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph - or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Share the passion and action of your time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.