Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Quotes
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A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!
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Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
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Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
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Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
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A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
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It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
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Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.
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Love prefers twilight to daylight.
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Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.
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Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
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Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
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To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
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Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.
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Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
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People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
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Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
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I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
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A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
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Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
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Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
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Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
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Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
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The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
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Apology is only egotism wrong side out.