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. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
