Oliver Wendell Holmes

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nobody talks much who doesn't say unwise things - things he did not mean to say. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

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. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.  - Oliver Wendell Holmes

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Old age is fifteen years older than I am. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Pretty much all the honest truthtelling there is in the world is done by children. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man has his will - but woman has her way. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's secret hope outlives them all. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth looking at. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Heredity: An omnibus in which all our ancestors ride, and every now and then, one of them puts his head out and embarasses us. - Oliver Wendell Holmes