Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
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.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
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.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it all about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or that our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
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.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
On every stem, on every leaf, and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes