Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

Could such a many-chambered edifice have stood a century and a half and not have had its passages of romance to bequeath their lingering legends to the after-time?... It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds...

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

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

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified.

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

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

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.

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

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men — from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.