Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point.

When somebody brings up a movie (of mine) that I haven't heard about in a long time, I feel like a 70-year-old pitcher at a bar somewhere, and somebody walks in and says, 'Oh, my God, I was in St. Louis and I saw you. You pitched a shutout.' It's real. I really did do that, because someone today remembers it.

When I think about my father, the first image that comes to mind is holding his hand as he drove me to the train station six weeks before he died; I had never noticed how beautiful his hands were until I saw them, for the first and last time, entwined in mine.

We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.

Old people are fond of giving good advice; it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

Observation is an old man's memory.

The older I get, the better I used to be.

Remembering is painful, it's difficult, but it can be inspiring and it can give wisdom.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Experience is what you have after you've forgotten her name.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

The more you are getting older, you lose a little something. Of course there is another advantage, because of your long experience you can use it.

Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.

Let others hail the rising sun: I bow to that whose course is run.

The older I get the better I used to be!

I'm 78. We've lost a lot of our great stars. I can't hang out with those who aren't here. The phone service to Heaven is so bad, you know. But I get to visit with their memories.

I suppose you always look back at how easier things were being young. There's always a shame that you're not as naive as you were.

I've always reflected on the game.