Austin O'Malley Quotes

Wealth is a tide which flows into one place by ebbing from another.

The monk that invented gunpowder did as much to stop war as did all the sermons of his brethren.

The smaller the head, the bigger the dream.

The only thing in the world we really possess is our knowledge of the truth.

A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.

Autumn is a hint from God to Old Age.

There are more gluttons than drunkards in hell.

No man can have a reasonable opinion of women until he has long lost interest in hair-restorers.

It is yesterday that makes tomorrow so sad.

A great tragedy passes from crest to hollow of passion, rises and sinks again, as rhythmically as sea-waves.

Well begun is not only half done, but often fully cooked.

Every wheatfield of human thought after a while becomes filled with cockle; then the husbandmen destroy the grain with the cockle and plant anew.

There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists.

And death, that sits in marble silence cold, Will furnish hope to those who may behold The meaning in the everlasting change Of all that dies, returning, wondrous strange.

Art is one of man's few serious activities.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

The half-baked sermon causes spiritual indigestion

If all fools wore white hoods, any crowd would look like a field of blooming buckwheat.

Friends made fast seldom remain fast.

Gold is so heavy it settles down upon the lowest souls.

You are not obliged to put on evening clothes to meet God.

If you are ignorant enough, you can walk like a cat on the slippery roof-ridge of danger.

You cannot build up a character in a solitude; you need a formed character to stand a solitude.

That a mouse of scandal whisks its foolish tail across the church's floor is not sufficient cause for clamorous leaping out of its windows.

Truth as philosophy is a gas; as art, it is visible steam.

Nations die first in the big cities.

If you snub Conscience a few times she will cut your acquaintance.

Each man's soul is a menagerie where Conscience, the animal-tamer, lives with a collection of wild beasts.

The perfect critic is one ... that sees with the eyes of posterity.

The hardest fact in the world to accept is the inevitable mixture of evil with good in all things.

Love dwindles by pairing.

That the saints were usually in ill luck does not canonize you.

The only real change in life comes with the consciousness of old age.

Call it the Absolute, the Ideal, Perfection, Sanctity, Decency, or what you will, but strive toward it or you will smother in the morass.

We are plated with piety, not alloyed with it.

Power should answer by action, not by speech.

Some men pray only when the world is dark, as owls hoot at night.

You can swim in life and seawater, but both are hard to swallow.

Justice and the facade of a temple are seen best from the outside.

Liberty has as many chains as an iron-monger's shop, and as rusty.

You can buy life only with life.

That art is best which suggests most.

It is a mean thief or a successful author that plunders the dead.

Life is being, not having.

When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.

A sin is nothing but a deordination of reason, but that is enough.

Death is an antidote for this life, and it makes another more stable form of life which is insoluble in everything.

Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.

If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.