Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

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.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

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.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.