Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes

All limitations are self-imposed.

The AmenT of Nature is always a flower.

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be "consistent."

A sick man that gets talking about himself a woman that gets talking about her baby and an author that begins reading out of his own book never know when to stop.

The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Don't be consistent but be simply true.

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

You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man, and to the man with special talents, this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: "The work is done."

An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.

If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement, or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.

Thou, oh my country, hast thy foolish ways, Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

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

Nature, when she invented, manufactured and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.

Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.