Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

And my experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if any thing is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

And there 's a nice youngster of excellent pith,— Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

I am a very particular person about having all I write printed as I write it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my productions, especially verse. A misprint kills a sensitive author. An intentional change of his text murders him. No wonder so many poets die young!

Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast in the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new edition coming. The extracts are ground-bait.

I should like to see any kind of a man distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman.

Man has his will - but woman has her way.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late.

A man's mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.

rouble creates a capacity to handle it.

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

Most persons have died before they expired - died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.