Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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 Sr.

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 Sr.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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 Sr.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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 Sr.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old, they grow old because they quit playing.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.