Oliver Wendell Holmes

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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 in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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!
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man has will, but woman has her way.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

... 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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our father's have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a large part than what we suspect of what we think.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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.

A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Amen of nature is always a flower.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes