Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else - very rarely to those who say to themselves, 'Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!'.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.