Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
And my experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Our morality seems to me only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There are three natural anaesthetics: Sleep, fainting, and death.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.