Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

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

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.

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.

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

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

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

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

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

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

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.

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.

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