Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes

When in doubt, do it.

A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!

Friendship is the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell him.

One unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above; Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

Life is a romantic business, but you have to make the romance.

Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.

A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb uppermost, and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Systems die; instincts remain.

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

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.

I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

A general flavour of mild decay, but nothing local, as one may say.

So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield to it an implicit or even a partial faith.