Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

America is the only place where man is full-grown!

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

Cupid "the little greatest enemy."

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.

The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?