Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

1356

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

1832

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

4269

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

4703

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

1376

Beware how you take away hope from another human being

3824

Science is the topography of ignorance.

4221

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

2489

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?

1187

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.

4743

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

1990

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.

1755

A man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

4095

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

4881