Quotes About Wisdom

Oliver Wendell Holmes (Jr.)

Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.

Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of logic.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't 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.

Logic is logic. That's all I say.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

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

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men — from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

And if I should live to beThe last leaf upon the treeIn the spring,Let them smile, as I do now,At the old forsaken boughWhere I cling.

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

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Carve every word before you let it fall.

This was a world in which only the ignorant could be happy.