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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Sr_c1879.jpg/250px-Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Sr_c1879.jpg)
An American physician, professor, lecturer, and author. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894) was an American physician, professor, lecturer, and author. Regarded by his peers as one of the best writers of the 19th century, he is considered a member of the Fireside Poets. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). He is recognized as an important medical reformer.
Here are some famous quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
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When in doubt do it.
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Systems die; instincts remain.
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Logic is logic. That's all I say.
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Eloquence may set fire to reason.
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Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
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rouble creates a capacity to handle it.
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The AmenT of Nature is always a flower.
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Don't be consistent but be simply true.
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Life is a great bundle of little things.
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Imitation is a necessity of human nature.
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Man has his will - but woman has her way.
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Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
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Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.
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Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
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Husband and wife come to look alike at last.
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Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman.
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A man must get a thing before he can forget it.
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Faith as an intellectual state is self-reliance.
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Death tugs at my ear and says: Live I am coming.''
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A day's impact is better than a month of dead pull.
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A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure.
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Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.
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We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
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Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
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The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
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Friendship is the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
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This is a court of law young man not a court of justice.
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You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable.
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Apology - a desperate habit and one that is rarely cured.
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The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
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A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
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Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.
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Life is a fatal complaint and an eminently contagious one.
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The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.
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The reward of the general is not a bigger tent but command.
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The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms.
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Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get at the truth.
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Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.
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Life is a romantic business but you have to make the romance.
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Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.
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The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
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But friendship is the breathing rose with sweets in every fold.
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The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
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Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!
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A general flavour of mild decay but nothing local as one may say.
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Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
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The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
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The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
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Faith implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater.
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Greatness is not where we stand but in what direction we are moving.
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Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.
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Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave but not our hearts.
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Happiness consists in activity. It is running stream not a stagnant pool.
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To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
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Speak clearly if you speak at all; Carve every word before you let it fall.
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The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.
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Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
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A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not improve.
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Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
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Pick my left pocket of its silver dime but spare the right-it holds my golden time!
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Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
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Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.
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Without wearing any mask we are conscious of we have a special face for each friend.
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It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
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A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
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Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
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Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have: Cincinnati sounds worse.
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The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.
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The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
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Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
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When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
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The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars nor its great scholars great men.
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The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
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Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.
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To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
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A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
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Youth fades; love droops the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
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The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are but in what direction we are moving.
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The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
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A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
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When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow I look back.
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I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
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The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it the more it will contract.
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The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it the more it will contract.
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The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
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Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
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I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late.
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The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
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We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it but sail we must and not drift nor lie at anchor.
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Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber if he has common sense on the ground floor.
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An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
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Life is an end in itself and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
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People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
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I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself as against the saints who deny it.
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Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
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Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
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A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
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A man is a kind of inverted thermometer the bulb uppermost and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.
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Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.
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When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.
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One unquestioned text we read All doubt beyond all fear above; Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.
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I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
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When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
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The books we read should be chosen with great care that they may be as an Egyptian king wrote over his library The medicines of the soul.''
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The man who thinks his wife his baby his house his horse his dog and himself severely unequalled is almost sure to be a good-humored person.
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I should like to see any kind of a man distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
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Except in cases of necessity which are rare leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell him.
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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.
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What a blessed thing it is that nature when she invented manufactured and patented her audiors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
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The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.
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Talking is like playing on the harp there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.
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Life is action and passion; therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
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We must think things not words or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand if we are to keep to the real and the true.
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Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.
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A sick man that gets talking about himself a woman that gets talking about her baby and an author that begins reading out of his own book never know when to stop.
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After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.
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I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
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Most persons have died before they expired - 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.
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I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.
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A word is not a crystal transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
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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.
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If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.
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Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
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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 embroidery.
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For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until by and by out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.
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So long as the body is affected through the mind no audacious device even of the most manifestly dishonest character can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield to it an implicit or even a partial faith.
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A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen - no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.
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The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: 'The work is done.'
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A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.
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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.
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When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.
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If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
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You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
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If I had a formula for bypassing trouble I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
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The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.