Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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.

Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!Long has it waved on high,And many an eye has danced to seeThat banner in the sky;Beneath it rung the battle shout,And burst the cannon's roar—The meteor of the ocean airShall sweep the clouds no more.

And if I should live to beThe last leaf upon the treeIn the spring,Let them smile, as I do now,At the old forsaken boughWhere I cling.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?