“The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”

—  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books." by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 107
United States Supreme Court justice 1841–1935

Related quotes

Joel Spolsky photo

“Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now."”

Joel Spolsky (1965) American blogger

"Advice for Computer Science College Students" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html

Henry Adams photo

“Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Mark Kac photo

“When one is young, and seventeen is very young, one lives in the present. The future, even the near future, is cloaked in unreality.”

Mark Kac (1914–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Enigmas Of Chance (1985), Chapter 2, Lwów, p. 29.

Philip James Bailey photo

“The worst men often give the best advice.”

Philip James Bailey Festus

Festus (1839)

“The best careers advice given to the young … is "Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it."”

Katharine Whitehorn (1928) British writer

<span title="New York Public Library card required, can be requested online at http://nypl.org">"The Ten-Hour Week is Here to Stay,"</span> http://search.proquest.com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/hnpguardianobserver/docview/476248113/fulltextPDF/2EA0FBE19E60470DPQ/1 from The Observer (London, January 19, 1975 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/476248113.html)

William Gibson photo

“I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

Gary Snyder photo

“In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

Source: The Practice of the Wild: Essays

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“3387. Men apt to promise, are apt to forget.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Francis Bacon photo

“But yet he was reputed one of the wise men, that made answer to the question, when a man should marry,—A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Marriage and Single Life

Related topics