Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
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.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
Have the courage to act instead of react.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.
When in doubt, do it.
Every idea is an incitement...Eloquence may set fire to reason.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
