Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.”

“Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.”

“It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”

“Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!”

“Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.”

“When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... 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. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. ”

“It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.”

“I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me”

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,As the swift seasons roll!Leave thy low-vaulted past!Let each new temple, nobler than the last,Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,Till thou at length art free,Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!”

“Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.”

“Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.”

“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?”

“Every library should try to complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”

“Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all. ”

“Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!”

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

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

“Man has his will, but woman has her way.”

“The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.”