Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don't you know what that means? Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it.
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.
There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.
Husband and wife come to look alike at last
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. Friendship
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
