Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

Hell is paved with priests' skulls.

Conscience: something that feels terrible when everything else feels well.

If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.

I'm obviously slightly ill, because there is a burning desire to be perfect in me. It's probably the Catholic, or the ex-Catholic in me.

Hell is full of high court judges.

There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.

On days where I feel the karma is in balance I'm not afraid of death. And when I feel it's weighing heavily on the negative side, then I get very scared and just think about eternal damnation and how unpleasant that would be.

If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

If I had a soul, I’d probably wind up in hell anyway.

You know what I'm afraid of? That God is sick of us.

Sinners, hear and consider, if you wilfully condemn your souls to bestiality, God will condemn them to perpetual misery.

Look closely into his aims, observe the means by which he pursues them, discover what brings him content - and can the man's real worth remain hidden from you?

What is more insane than to be partakers of the Sacraments of the Lord and not partakers of the words of the Lord? These men truly have to say: "In Thy Name we have eaten and drunk," and they will have to hear: "I do not know you!" (Luke 13:26-27). They eat and drink His Body and Blood in the Sacrament and do not recognize in the Gospel His members spread over the whole world, and for this reason they are not numbered among them at the Judgment.

Embarrassment, or the risk of it, accompanies all your important choices.

Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.

Even as in the blessed in heaven there will be most perfect charity, so in the damned there will be the most perfect hate. Wherefore as the saints will rejoice in all goods, so will the damned grieve for all goods. Consequently the sight of the happiness of the saints will give them very great pain.

Answer all the questions that I'm too afraid to ask

And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

What is hell other than a realm in which unholiness works without restraint in body and soul?

Often, people who can do, don’t because they’re afraid of what people that can’t do will say about them doing.

The things I fear may all be imaginary, so what I fear most is my imagination.

The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children the history of the game of marbles has quite as much importance as the history of religion or of forms of government. It Is a history, moreover, that is magnificently spontaneous; and it was therefore perhaps not entirely useless to seek to throw light on the child's judgment of moral value by a preliminary study of the social behaviour of children amongst themselves.

I'd always been scared of people with tertiary education and high intellects in case they found me wanting. I thought they viewed me as just a welder who knew a few jokes.