Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have – Cincinnati sounds worse. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ‘consistent’. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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? – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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, Sr.
A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
I like children; I like ’em, and I respect ’em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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, Sr.
The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn’t got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
