Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so …

Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars?

But Memory blushes at the sneer, And Honor turns with frown defiant, And Freedom, leaning on her spear, Laughs louder than the laughing giant.

His home! the Western giant smiles, And twirls the spotty globe to find it; This little speck, the British Isles? ’Tis but a freckle,—never mind it.

Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her.

One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial …

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling.

You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;—something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it.

The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to …

The hat is the ultimum moriens of "respectability".

Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is force.

The great delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and according to law.

One unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above; Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it—God is love.

The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—most of all in …

I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages …

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.

Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.

There is that glorious Epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the Historian, in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of …

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.

hydrostatic paradox of controversy?