Oliver Wendell Holmes

The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

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.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say 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.

If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.

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

An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

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."

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

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.

You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. 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 neighbour 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 neighbour you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.