Top 100 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes
#4. If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#5. Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#6. We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#7. It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#9. Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#11. Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#14. There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class of critics; that namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within range.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#15. The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#16. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#17. It's a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#18. 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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#22. The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#23. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe ... that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market ... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#26. But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#27. A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#29. On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#30. The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#34. The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#35. General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#36. From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#37. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#39. One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#42. We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#45. The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#47. But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#48. If one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#49. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#50. I think that, 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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#51. Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#54. Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#56. History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#57. I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#58. Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#60. The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#62. I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#63. Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#64. We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#65. It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#66. A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#69. The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#70. Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#71. Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#72. There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#73. It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#74. The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#75. Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#76. The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#82. It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#83. The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#84. You hear that boy laughing?you think he's all fun; But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done; The children laugh loud as they troop to his call, And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#85. To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#90. The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#91. As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#92. The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb'd in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#93. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#94. We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#95. The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#96. Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#97. A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#98. In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#100. But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
