A biography for Oliver Wendell Holmeshasn’t been written yet.
“People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.”
“Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”
“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”
“The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law.”
“Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.”
“The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.”
“Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.”
“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.”
“A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.”
“To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.”
“You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.”
“A new untruth is better than an old truth.”
“Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.”
“Beware how you take away hope from another human being.”
“Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.”
“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.”
“Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.”
“Have the courage to act instead of react.”
“A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.”
“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”