266 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The longing for certainty... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics of the chips that were left.

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors

Husband and wife come to look alike at last

Our brains our seventy year clocks, the angel of life winds them up once and for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection.

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.