Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Beat a man with the strength of your argument, not with the strength of your arm.

Between two groups of men that want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds I see no remedy except force... It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming."

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies they are ready enough to tell them.

Every pursuit is great when greatly pursued.

Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind, and somtimes agaisnt it - but sail we must. And not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Live Today like you may die tomorrow, Because someday you will be right.

Man has his will - but woman has her way.

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul it takes one that knows it well -- parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

People can be divided into two classes those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, 'Why wasn't it done the other way'

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. (The autocrat of the breakfast-table)

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

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