Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.

Yes, child of suffering, thou may'st well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor!

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

I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.

The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man ... is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

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.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

The best servant does his work unseen.

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.