Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. quotes - page 3

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children. (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
You hear that boy laughingyou think he's all fun But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done The children laugh loud as they troop to his call, And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Most persons have died before they expire, - 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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I can't help preferring champagne to ditch water - I doubt if the universe does.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I always say you can get your tragedy of any desired length in England, from thirty seconds to a lifetime. I had one adorable one of twenty-nine minutes by the watch. At the end of that time I started for my train. Woman I'd had a glimpse of in London - walk. She sat on a style, I below her, gazing into her eyes - then, "remember this lane," "while memory holds its seat, etc." "Adieu." And I still do and ever shall remember her, and I rather think she does me a little bit. What imbecilities for an old fellow to be talking. But if one knows his place and makes way for younger men when he isn't sure, it is better perhaps not quite to abandon interest in the sports of life.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Most men think dramatically, not quantitatively, a fact that the rich would be wise to remember more than they do. We are apt to contrast the palace with the hovel, the dinner at Sherry's with the workingman's pail, and never ask how much or realize how little is withdrawn to make the prizes of success. (Subordinate prizes - since 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.
Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Vanity is the most philosophical of those feelings that we are taught to despise. For vanity recognizes that if a man is in a minority of one we lock him up, and therefore longs for an assurance from others that one's work has not been in vain.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them. (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is urged in the first place that contempts cannot be crimes, because, although punishable by imprisonment, and therefore, if crimes, infamous, they are not within the protection of the Constitution and the Amendments giving a right to trial by jury, etc., to persons charged with such crimes. But the provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
If a thing has been practised for two hundred years by common consent, it will need a strong case for the Fourteenth Amendment to affect it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.