Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.”

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

“Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.”

“Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.”

“A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.”

“The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.”

“Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.”

“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!'.”

“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...”

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

“To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”

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

“The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”

“Don't be 'consistent', but be simply true.”

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

“Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do...”

“Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.”

“Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?”

“The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.”

“Love prefers twilight to daylight.”