Quotes by Oliver Holmes, Jr.

• The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
• I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
• Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
• You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
• We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
• Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
• To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
• To be seventy years young is sometimes for more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
• To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
• There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
• The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.
• The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
• It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.
• Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
• Don't be 'consistent,' but be simply true.
• 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.
• Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
• I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
• The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
• Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
• Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
• The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
• Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
• Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.
• Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
• On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
• People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
• The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
• Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
• The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.
• A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
• Carve every word before you let it fall.
• Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
• As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.
• Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
• A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
• A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
• A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
• A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
• A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.