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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Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
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Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
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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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Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
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It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.
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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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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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The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
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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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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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Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
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Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
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To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
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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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Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
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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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Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
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Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.