Daily Inspiration Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Holmes’s line is a neat little judicial smirk aimed at the human ego: the most ordinary impulse we have is the desire to be extraordinary. It works because it flips what people like to believe about themselves. We treat ambition, originality, “making a mark” as personal signature traits, evidence of singularity. Holmes reframes that hunger as mass-produced. The bite is in “commonplace” doing double duty: the world is full of average things, and the wish to escape averageness is itself the most average thing of all.

As a jurist shaped by the churn of post-Civil War modernity, Holmes had a hard-headed suspicion of moral grandstanding and self-mythologizing. His legal realism insisted that lofty principles don’t float above society; they’re entangled with power, habit, and outcomes. Read in that context, the quote isn’t just social commentary, it’s a warning label. When everyone wants to be remarkable, the rhetoric of exception becomes cheap currency: each litigant’s story is “unlike any other,” each movement frames itself as destiny, each judge is tempted to author a legacy rather than decide a case.

The subtext is almost democratic in its severity. Holmes doesn’t deny the wish; he normalizes it, which is a way of deflating it. The line quietly asks: if your craving for distinction is universal, how much authority should it have over truth, justice, or policy? In a culture addicted to exceptionalism, he offers the cold comfort that vanity is shared - and the sharper comfort that shared vanity shouldn’t govern.