1809-1894, American Author, Wit, Poet
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Memory]


Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Critics and Criticism]


Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Commonplace]


Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Books and Reading]


Our brains our seventy year clocks, the angel of life winds them up once and for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Mind]


Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death — of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Death and Dying]


People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn't it done the other way?
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Humankind]


People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Opinions]


People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ''consistent.''
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Contradiction]


People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Puns]


Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Children]


Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Trust]


Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Revolutions and Revolutionaries]


Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Truth]


Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Common Sense]


Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Advertising]


Simple people… are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Perception]


Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Sin]


Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Society]


Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
Oliver Wendell Holmes – [Conceit]

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