Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.

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.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.

Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

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.

With all humility, I think, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." Infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society

The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.