Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Quotes
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Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.
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Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
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But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
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Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.
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Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
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Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else - very rarely to those who say to themselves, 'Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!'.
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A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
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A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
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A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
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The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
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Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
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Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.
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The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
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Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
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The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.
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The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
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Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
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A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
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It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
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Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
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Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.
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The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
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The Amen of nature is always a flower.
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Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.