Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes

When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow I look back.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Life is a great bundle of little things.

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 embroidery.

Dont be consistent but be simply true.

Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get at the truth.

Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman.

Man has his will - but woman has her way.

We must think things not words or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand if we are to keep to the real and the true.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.

When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

I like children; I like em, and I respect em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I dont disparage envy, but I dont accept it as legitimately my master.

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a mans upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasnt got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.