Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Quotes about life

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was United States Supreme Court justice. Explore interesting quotes on life.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: 214 quotes7 likes

“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”

Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96.
1910s

“I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"The Soldier's Faith" Memorial Day address at Harvard University (30 May 1895) http://people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/holmesfa.htm. <br class="br">1890s <br class="br">Context: As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.

“I always say you can get your tragedy of any desired length in England, from thirty seconds to a lifetime. I had one adorable one of twenty-nine minutes by the watch. At the end of that time I started for my train. Woman I'd had a glimpse of in London — walk. She sat on a style, I below her, gazing into her eyes — then, "remember this lane," "while memory holds its seat, etc." "Adieu." And I still do and ever shall remember her, and I rather think she does me a little bit. What imbecilities for an old fellow to be talking. But if one knows his place and makes way for younger men when he isn't sure, it is better perhaps not quite to abandon interest in the sports of life.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock (23 August 1895); reported in Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock (1961) edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe, Vol. 1, p. 60; also reported in The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Judicial Opinions (1954), p. 437.
1890s

“A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Writing for the Court, New Jersey v. New York, et al., 283 U.S. 336, 342 (1931).
1930s

“It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1880s, In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire (1884)

“That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

250 U.S. 616; 630.
1910s, Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

“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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1880s, In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire (1884)

“Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while living we are living to ends outside ourselves”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96.
1910s

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience… The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. book The Common Law

The Common Law (1881), p. 1.
1880s

“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.

Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 86.
1910s

“Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85.
1910s

“Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Attribution reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), which states that this is not verified in works about him nor in Magnificent Yankee, the film about him. Holmes expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to Sir Frederick Pollock (May 24, 1929): "For sixty years she made life poetry for me". Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-Pollock Letters (1941), vol. 2, p. 243.
Attributions

“One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Ibid.
1890s