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All Quotes by author - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

" A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born. "

" A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them! "

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

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

" A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. "

" A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. "

" A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time. "

" Apology is only egotism wrong side out. "

" A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. "

" A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. "

" A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day. "

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

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

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

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

" Don't be 'consistent', but be simply true. "

" 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 tact and courtesy become. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads. "

" Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other. "

" 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!'. "

" Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air. "

" Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us. "

" Have the courage to act instead of react. "

" I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. "

" 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. "

" I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them. "

" Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. "

" I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived. "

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