Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

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

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

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

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

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Love prefers twilight to daylight.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

The Amen of nature is always a flower.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

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.

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.