Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .

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.

Share the passion and action of your time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

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

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, 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.

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.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in which direction we are moving.

To know is not less than to feel.

To live is to function. That is all there is in living.

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

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 superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.