If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. 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

More quotations from Oliver Wendell Holmes

In youth we learn; in age we understand.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

More quotations tagged with “trouble”

Actually, if you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me. Serial killers, stock swindlers, drug dealers, Christian Republicans. I'm not sure motivation is always a good thing. You show me a lazy prick who's lying in bed all day, watching tv,… and I'll show you a guy who's not causing any trouble.

—George Carlin

trouble motivation

Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.

—Alice Hoffman in Practical Magic

If you have the ability and the opportunity to help someone, but you don't do anything just because you're scared or it's inconvenient or something, then maybe you're just as bad as the people who caused the trouble in the first place.

—Bree Despain in The Lost Saint

people bad help trouble opportunity ability

A man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

—Henry Miller

trouble pain security

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

success trouble trying stupidity

History

16 Jan 2016 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. 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.