Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famous quotes

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Inspirational #Wise #Travel

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Lonely #Memories #Life And Love

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Life #Art #Pain

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Pay #Taxes #Civilized

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Faith #Humility #Men

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Inspirational #Motivational #Work

Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Rip #Mean #Facts

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Civilization #Pay #Taxes

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Lawyer #Deals #Gym

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Law #Justice #Court

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Law #Logic

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Negative #Moral #Ethics

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Education #Forget #Wells

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Jobs #Mean #Attention

The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Voice #Race #Goal

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Truth Is

For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Thinking #Play #Government

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Rivers #Water #Treasure

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#History #Causes #Thread

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Selfish #Humility #Eye

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Humility #Men #Firsts

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Religious #Attitude #Thinking

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Two #People #World

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Life #Atheism #Had Enough

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Fate #Names

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Competition

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Decision #Common #Forgotten

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Justice #Energy #Enthusiasm

Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Opportunity #Justice #Doubt

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Believe #Denial #World

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Men #Minorities #Locks

The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Thinking #Discovery #Views

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Book #Reading #Ideas

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Satisfaction #Gains #Doe

The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Law

We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Certainty

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Compassion #Reflection #Knives

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Men #Fire #Liberty

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Men #Chiefs #Ends

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Decision #Intuition #Judgment

Eloquence may set fire to reason.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Fire #May #Reason

One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#Men #Effort #Conflict