Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes

"Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water."

"The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius."

"Our brains our seventy year clocks, the angel of life winds them up once and for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection."

"It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen."

"Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise."

"It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at."

"Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles."

"Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend."

"A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions."

"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up."

"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum."

"We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe."

"Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body."

"Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface."

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

"A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."

"Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air."

"The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort."

"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."

"What I wouldn't give to be seventy again!"