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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 869
AUTHOR: Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935)
QUOTATION: Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
ATTRIBUTION: Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, “The Class of ’61,” speech delivered at the 50th anniversary of graduation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 28, 1911.—Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes, pp. 96–97 (1934).
SUBJECTS: Idealists