Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Quote	Categories	Rating	Rate
"A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."	Love
"A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."	Friendship, Dreams
"Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!"	Music
"Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes."	God, Taxes
"Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues."	Virtue
"But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye."	Quotations
"But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."	God, Truth
"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them."	Friendship
"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them."	Government, Friends
"From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward."	Age
"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."	America
"I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate.... It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account."	Women
"I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions -- adding that no general proposition is worth a damn."	Facts
"I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization."	God, Taxes
"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it."	Anti-Religion, Adversity
"If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better."	Health
"It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times."	Success, Law
"It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return."	Government
"It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV."	Success, Law
"Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one."	Success, Life
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Browse Oliver Wendell Holmes quotes by category:

Adversity	Age	America
Anti-God	Anti-Religion	Books
Character	Conformity	Dreams
Equality	Experience	Facts
Friends	Friendship	God
Government	Health	Ideas
Justice	Knowledge	Law
Learning	Life	Love
Men	Miscellaneous	Morality
Music	Quotations	Reading
Science	Success	Taxes
Time	Truth	Virtue
Wisdom	Women	Youth