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Soul
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The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Speech (freedom of)
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The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Success & Failure
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The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Thought
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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.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Tradition
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Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Tragedy
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A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Trouble, Troubles
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If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say: meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it, and had better be on speaking terms with it.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Trust
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Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Truth
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A new untruth is better than an old truth.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Vanity
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Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Wealth
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Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Will, Willpower
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Man has will, but woman has her way.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Wisdom
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It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Words
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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.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Work
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Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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World
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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.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Youth
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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.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Books by and about Oliver Wendell Holmes