Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes
The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.
The Constitution is an experiment as all life is an experiment.
We see what you are driving at, but you have not said it, and therefore we shall go on as before.
The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
A page of history is worth a volume of logic.
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man.
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.
General propositions do not decide concrete cases.
The chief end of a man is to frame general ideas, and... no general idea is worth a damn.
Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds is that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves.
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
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.
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.
I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
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.
