Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Quotes

Beware how you take away hope from another human being

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. ...

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over...

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

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its...

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

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

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration,...

The Last LeafI saw him once before,As he passed by the door,And againThe pavement stones resound,As ...

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

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that th...

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unles...

There's nothing that keeps its youth, so far as I know, but a tree and truth.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new ...

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

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

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to i...

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked

A man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimension...

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

Science is the topography of ignorance.

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

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of ...

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as ...