Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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