266 Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.

Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.

Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death / of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn't it done the other way?

The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Now Landlord Porter, grave, concise, severe, Master, nay, monarch in his proper sphere, Though to belles-lettres he pretended not, Lived close to Harvard, so knew what was what

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.