223 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

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.

I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.