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

— 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)

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All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

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?"

Sanu Sharma

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

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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.