Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love prefers twilight to daylight.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

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