Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be "consistent."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
- 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.
In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.