Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Talking is like playing the harp, there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. Wisdom
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. Science
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
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. Science
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
I firmly believe that if the whole material medical could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the sea.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
This is an inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling up beyond a certain height knowledge which is in itself mere trash and lumber to a man whose life is to be one long fight with death and disease, there will be some sharp questions asked by and by.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. Friendship
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Speak not too well of one who scarce will know himself transfigured in its roseate glow; Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true, remembering always he belongs to you; Deal with him as a truant, if you will, But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
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.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes