Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It is better to be seventy years young than forty years old!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Action
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Learning
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Advice
It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Belief, Faith
Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum—but you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question how much fire you have in your belly.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Happiness, Life and Living
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Remembrance
The reward of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Success
When in doubt, do it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Value of Time, Time Management
Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Leisure
Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Experience
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions—adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Facts
The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Effort, Success & Failure, Achievement
A question like the present should be disposed of without undue delay. But a State cannot be expected to move with the celerity of a private business man; it is enough if it proceeds, in the language of the English Chancery, with all deliberate speed.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: History
For I say unto you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you are a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought—the subtle rapture of postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. And if this joy should not be yours, still it is only thus you can know that you have done what lay in you to do—can say that you have lived, and be ready for the end.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Purpose
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Ideals, Idealism
A day’s impact is better than a month of dead pull.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Value of a Day, Work, Time Management
It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Justice, Lawyers, Law
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Thoughts, Thought
For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until, by and by, out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance
But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Perseverance
The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Justice
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.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Life and Living, Goals, Aspirations
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Topics: Sharing, Ability, Life and Living, Life, Procrastination, Passion, Inaction, Getting Going
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Louis Brandeis American Jurist
- Hugo Black American Attorney
- Elliot Richardson American Statesman
- William Blackstone English Judge
- Felix Frankfurter Austrian-Born Jurist
- Albert Pike American Masonic Scholar
- John Quincy Adams American Head of State
- Archibald Cox American Lawyer
- Learned Hand American Jurist
- Edward Everett Hale American Unitarian Clergyman
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