Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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!

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

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

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

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

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

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.

Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

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

Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

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

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

What gems of painting or statuary are in the world of art, or what flowers are in the world of nature, are gems of thought to the cultivated and thinking.

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

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.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

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

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

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