Speak clearly, if you speak at all carve every word before you let it fall.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotations
We found 74 matching quotations.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
It is the province of knowledge to speak
And it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
And it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.
Between two groups of men that want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds I see no remedy except force... It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.
One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
A person's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Beat a man with the strength of you argument, not with the strength of your arm.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming."
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
To know is not less than to feel.
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.
Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
If I were dying, my last words would be, Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
A page of history is worth a pound of logic.
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.
Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving -- we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
The life of the law has not been logic but experience.
To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
Man has his will - but woman has her way.
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.
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.
Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
To live is to function. That is all there is in living.
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in which direction we are moving.
The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
Every pursuit is great when greatly pursued.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
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?