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In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug. Chess sometimes plays a similar role. In their unhappiness over the events of this world, some immerse themselves in a kind of self-sufficiency in mathematics. (Some have engaged in it for this reason alone.)

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May 29, 2026

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About Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841 - March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. Noted for his long service, his concise and pithy opinions, and his deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for his "clear and present danger" majority opinion in the 1919 case of Schenck v. United States , as well as one of the most influential American common-law judges.

Popular Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

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 our country in return.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.

To live is to function. That is all there is in living.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

To know is not less than to feel.

To live fully is to be engaged in the passions of one's times.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

All I mean by truth is what I can't help thinking.

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one’s self: 'the work is done.' But just as one says that, the answer comes: 'The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.' The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.

I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought; not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

If a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.

The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

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.

Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to be all one.

Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.

Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes.

Beware how you take away hope from any human being.

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.

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that love us.

People talk of fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

With all humility, I think, 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.' Infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

Nothing is so commonplace as to wish to be remarkable.

If we are only as the potter’s clay Made to be fashioned as the artist wills, And broken into shards if we offend The eye of Him who made us, it is well.

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 the peril of being judged not to have lived.

The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not God.

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.

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 the time in which it is used.

A man’s mind stretched by a new idea, can never go back to its original dimensions.

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