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A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Age: 93 †
Born: 1841
Born: March 8
Died: 1935
Died: March 6
Judge
Jurist
Lawyer
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Boston
Massachusetts
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver W. Holmes
Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr
Holmes
Oliver Wendell
Jr.
Oliver Wendell
Jr. Holmes
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr
Oliver Holmes
Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr.
Time
Content
Crystal
Life
Circumstances
Crystals
Color
Vary
Word
Greatly
Living
Transparent
Thought
Skin
Used
According
May
Skins
Unchanged

More quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class of critics that namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within range.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Carve every word before you let it fall.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.