Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes: 11

• A man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

  Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

• What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

  Over the Teacups

• It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

• Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked

  Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

• Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

• The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.

• The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

• Beware how you take away hope from another human being

• When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

• Science is the topography of ignorance.

• Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.