197 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.

A man’s opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

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.

Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.

Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.

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

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

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.