Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
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.
Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.
Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
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.
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.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames... We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.
