Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr Quotes

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To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

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

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason.

When in doubt, do it.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

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.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

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

I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.

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

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.

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