Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.Collection: Hope
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.Collection: Great
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.Collection: Government
Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God.Collection: Age
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.Collection: Death
The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.Collection: Experience
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.Collection: Education
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.Collection: Legal
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.Collection: Equality
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Freedom
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.Collection: Education
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.Collection: Faith
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.Collection: Money
If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Great
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.Collection: Life
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.Collection: Faith
The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
When in doubt, do it.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
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.
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 time in which it is used.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.
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.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.Collection: Inspirational
My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.Collection: Swings
The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.Collection: Men
Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.Collection: Insperational
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.Collection: Motivational
This is a court of law, not a court of justice.Collection: Law
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.Collection: Dog
Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.Collection: Men
Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!Collection: Powerful
I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.Collection: Civilization