Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was an American jurist and legal scholar who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. He is one of the most widely cited U.S. Supreme Court justices and most influential American common law judges in history, noted for his long service, pithy opinions—particularly those on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy—and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures.
Holmes retired from the court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for oldest justice on the Supreme Court.
He previously served as a Brevet Colonel in the American Civil War, in which he was wounded three times, as an associate justice and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and as Weld Professor of Law at his alma mater, Harvard Law School.
List of quotes
| The Amen of nature is always a flower. |
| Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth. |
| Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor. |
| Simple people… are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them. |
| Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. |
| Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall. |
| Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. |
| Stupidity often saves a man from going mad. |
| The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. |
| People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ‘consistent’. |
| The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. |
| The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live. |
| The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn’t worth a damn. |
| It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God. |
| Every calling is great when greatly pursued. |
| 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. |
| Every idea is an incitement… Eloquence may set fire to reason. |
| Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise. |
| Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. |
| Knowledge like timber shouldn’t be mush use till they are seasoned. |
| Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow. |
| Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. |
| Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness. |
| Love prefers twilight to daylight. |
| Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up. |
| Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust. |
| Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel. |
| Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children. |
| Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. |
| 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. |
| Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left. |
| Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. |
| Old age is fifteen years older than I am. |
| One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. |
| Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection. |
| 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. |
| He has half the deed done who has made a beginning. |
| Don’t be “consistent” but be simple true. |
| 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. |
| Don’t you stay at home of evenings? Don’t you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet? |
| Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end. |
| Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. |
| 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. |
| Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant. |
| It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living. |
| If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end. |
| Have the courage to act instead of react. |
| Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool. |
| Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us. |
| Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air. |
| Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads. |
| I don’t generally feel anything until noon, then it’s time for my nap. |
| I won’t accept anything less than the best a player’s capable of doing… and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team! |
| A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time. |
| 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. |
| Controversy equalizes fools and wise men – and the fools know it. |
| A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them! |
| A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend. |
| A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. |
| A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. |
| It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. |
| Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other. |
| Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else. |
| A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. |
| A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. |
| Apology is only egotism wrong side out. |
| Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force. |
| Beware how you take away hope from another human being. |
| But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold. |
| Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have – Cincinnati sounds worse. |
| A new untruth is better than an old truth. |
| The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer. |
| The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size. |
| The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort. |
| The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think. |
| 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. |
| Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. |
| The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men – from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. |
| Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. |
| Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts. |
| When in doubt, do it. |
| We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing. |
| Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light. |
| 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. |
| To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. |
| To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one’s own moral aesthetic preferences. |
| Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. |
| This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice. |
| The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. |
| The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. |
| The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius. |
| To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor. |