197 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

While we’ve youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

What a new face courage puts on everything. – Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one’s own moral aesthetic preferences.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

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.

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.