Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

More quotations from Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

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