Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - Elsie Venner (1861)

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Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while you are about it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Leverage is everything,—was what I used to say;—don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. And the temptation is to some natures a very great one. Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. In common life we shirk it by forming habits, which take the place of self-determination. In politics party-organization saves us the pains of much thinking before deciding how to cast our vote.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,—'atheists,' heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just like other folks.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Beliefs must be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the soul's wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It did n't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane. They are in-sane, out of health, morally. Reason, which is food to sound minds, is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless administered with the greatest caution; perhaps, not at all. Avoid collision with them, so far as you honorably can.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.