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Old Tune, in whose banks we deposit our notes,
Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats;
He keeps all his customers still in arrears
By lending them minutes and charging them years.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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More quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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

The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

All Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

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From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

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You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.

Abraham Cowley Poems (1656)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.