Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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

The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

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

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.

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

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

Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason.

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

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

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.

Go on, fair Science; soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast; Her vulgar lingers formed a tree, But thou hast trained it to a post.

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.

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 wine tells truth - and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.

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

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

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

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

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