All limitations are self-imposed.

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
- Topic: Education, Leadership
- Location: Grand Teton National Park
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
More Quotes from Grand Teton National Park
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What signifies knowing the names, if you know not the nature of things?
There is no education like adversity.
The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.
Public education has not produced an educated public.
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn.
Consensus: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: 'I stand for consensus?
I have nothing but contempt for the kind of governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State; and as for the man who sets private friendship above the public welfare—I have no use for him, either.
To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.
Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people – men and women, boys and girls – that make the world a special place.
Only 3 things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and under performance. Everything else requires leadership.
Love inspires, illumines, designates and leads the way.
I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.
