Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The reason why he wrote while standing up:
Nothing conduces to brevity like a caving in of the knees.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. 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.

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.
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.
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.
The remoter and more general aspects of the law are those which give it universal interest. It is through them that you not only become a great master in your calling, but connect your subject with the universe and catch an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of the universal law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.