Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes - "The Poet at the Breakfast-Table", 1872
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

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 as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.

Beat a man with the strength of you argument, not with the strength of your arm.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
Oliver Wendell Holmes - The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Between two groups of men that want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds I see no remedy except force... It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men.

Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming."

The life of the law has not been logic but experience.

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Every pursuit is great when greatly pursued.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.

Greatness is not in were we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind, and somtimes agaisnt it - but sail we must. And not drift, nor lie at anchor.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes