Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy — I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The minute a phrase becomes current it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory... It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.

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.
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades!
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,--
Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man... is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The last thing an old teacher wants is, as you know full well, a new set of terms for a familiar set of objects. It is hard instructing ancient canine individuals in new devices. It is hard teaching old professors new tricks.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.