Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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 can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.

Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science--is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most persons have died before they expire,--died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.

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

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks

Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not mean to say as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes.

I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.

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.

You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before they always did, they always will and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words . . .

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

Beliefs must be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the soul's wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left

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.

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

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