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General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.

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.
Judgment
Propositions
General
Concrete
Depends
Depend
Cases
Intuition
Decision
Subtle
Decide
Premise
Majors
Articulate
Major
Premises

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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.
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Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
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Most people have died before they expire died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
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Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.
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Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.
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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.
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I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.
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Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.
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Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
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Certitude is not the test of certainty.
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The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.
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The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.
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I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.
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To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.
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The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one's powers towards some great end.
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To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.
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To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
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We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
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For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
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Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
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