Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - Life Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

View all Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
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.

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.
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's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

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.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Fresh air and innocence are good if you don't take too much of them — but I always remember that most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

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.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
But if we are to yield to fashionable conventions, it seems to me that theaters are as much devoted to public use as anything well can be. We have not that respect for art that is one of the glories of France. But to many the superfluous is the necessary, and it seems to me that Government does not go beyond its sphere in attempting to make life livable for them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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 us 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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.