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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Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
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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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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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People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
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Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
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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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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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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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Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
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Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
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Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
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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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Have the courage to act instead of react.
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Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
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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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We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.