223 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

Success. Is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going.

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

Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end.