Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - Man Quotes

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There are some men, who as they approach 70, read the Bible and prepare to die. Others prepare themselves to live to 90. It has been my observation that if a man prepares to live to 90, but dies at 70, no harm is done. If however, a man prepares to live to 70 but ends up dying at 90, then his last 20 years will be hell.

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.
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.
Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about — you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer — and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as appears, his grounds are just as good as ours.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The chief end of man is to frame general ideas—and…no general idea is worth a damn.

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.
As I grow older I grow calm. If I feel what are perhaps an old man's apprehensions, that competition from new races will cut deeper than working men's disputes and will test whether we can hang together or can fight.

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.
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.
To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Vanity is the most philosophical of those feelings that we are taught to despise. For vanity recognizes that if a man is in a minority of one we lock him up, and therefore longs for an assurance from others that one's work has not been in vain.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or, to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

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.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.