Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

rouble creates a capacity to handle it.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.

What a blessed thing it is that nature when she invented manufactured and patented her audiors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Most persons have died before they expired - died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.

When in doubt do it.

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.

A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure.

A moments insight is sometimes worth a lifes experience.

The life of the law has not been logic it has been experience.

Faith as an intellectual state is self-reliance.

Faith implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater.