Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

Carve every word before you let it fall.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our father's have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a large part than what we suspect of what we think.

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 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.