Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"Mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward."

"How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!"

"I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,— give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen."

"Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all."

"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor."

"Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies?"

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!"

"Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still!"

"Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy? Don't know what it means? - Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it."

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

"There is that glorious Epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the Historian, in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men: "Good Americans when they die go to Paris.""

"Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar."

"The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city."

"I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question."

"But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood is the sacrifice."

"The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men."

"Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned."

"The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed."

"One unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above; Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it—God is love."

"The great delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and according to law."

"Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is force."

"The hat is the ultimum moriens of "respectability"."

"The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming."

"You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;—something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it."

"It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling."

"One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also."

"Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her."

"His home! the Western giant smiles, And twirls the spotty globe to find it; This little speck, the British Isles? ’Tis but a freckle,—never mind it."

"But Memory blushes at the sneer, And Honor turns with frown defiant, And Freedom, leaning on her spear, Laughs louder than the laughing giant."

"Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars?"

"The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper."

"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it."

"Little I ask, my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone, (A very plain brown stone will do,) That I may call my own;— And close at hand is such a one, In yonder street that fronts the sun."

"Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, That was built in such a logical way It ran a hundred years to a day?"

"A general flavor of mild decay."

"It went to pieces all at once— All at once and nothing first, Just as bubbles do when they burst."

"Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking."

"You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your opinion really want your praise, and will be contented with nothing less."

"Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else,—very rarely to those who say to themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!""

"How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!"

"Talk about it as much as you like,—one's breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion."

"A few can touch the magic string, And noisy Fame is proud to win them; Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!"

"O hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses!"

"What a miserable thing it is to be poor."

"Leverage is everything,—was what I used to say;—don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side."

"I do not know in what shape the practical question may present itself to you; but I will tell you my rule in life, and I think you will find it a good one. Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane. They are in-sane, out of health, morally. Reason, which is food to sound minds, is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless administered with the greatest caution; perhaps, not at all. Avoid collision with them, so far as you honorably can; keep your temper, if you can,—for one angry man is as good as another; restrain them from violence, promptly, completely, and with the least possible injury, just as in the case of maniacs,—and when you have got rid of them, or got them tied hand and foot so that they can do no mischief, sit down and contemplate them charitably..."

"If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. And the temptation is to some natures a very great one. Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. In common life we shirk it by forming habits, which take the place of self-determination. In politics party-organization saves us the pains of much thinking before deciding how to cast our vote."

"We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity."

"All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology."

"We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on."