Oliver wendell holmes, jr. quotes

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.

I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.

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

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.

Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

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.

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.

Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it.

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

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!

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.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.

To know is not less than to feel.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society

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.

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.

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.

Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age.

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

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.

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one's way of taking a fact.

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

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.

Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.

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

As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

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.

While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

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.

It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.

The noblest service comes from nameless hands; and the best servant does his work unseen.

The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

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.

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.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

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

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment.

A person of genius should marry a person of character.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about - you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.

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.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say 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.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.

Our dead brothers and sisters 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.

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.

Certitude is not the test of certainty.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Man has will, but woman has her way.

Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.

But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.

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

Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.

Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

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.

Carve every word before you let it fall.

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

For him in vain the envious seasons roll Who bears eternal summer in his soul.

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

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.

And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound.

To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman.

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

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 most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

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.