O. Henry Quotes

It is because he was unhappy that God created the world.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.

We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.

Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.

The life of a coquette is one constant lie; and the only rule by which you can form any correct judgment of them is that they are never what they seem.

Tact is the unsaid part of what you think.

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

Thinking first of money instead of work brings fear.

The best rose-bush, after all, is not that which has the fewest thorns, but that which bears the finest roses.

Love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best.

The strength of your life is measured by the strength of your will.

There is no conflict between the Old and the New; the conflict is between the False and the True.

Oregano is the spice of life.

People suffer from pain and call it evil, yet in reality it may be growing pains of the Spirit-the changing of the body into a finer and more spiritual substance.

There is no failure except failure to serve one's purpose.

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

Thinking is the hardest work we do.

The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

Without doubt, Thomas Edison is my greatest contemporary.

Let us fashion together a new world order.

Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

A man's college and university degrees mean nothing to me until I see what he is able to do with them.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

What goes best with a cup of coffee? Another cup.

There’s got to be someone for me. It’s not too much to ask. Just someone to be with. Someone to love. Someone to give everything to. Someone.

Good writers are of necessity rare.

The average is the borderline that keeps mere men in their place. Those who step over the line are heroes by the very act. Go.

Christ is made the sure foundation

It's a safe banking system, a sound banking system. Our regulators are on top of it. This is a very manageable situation.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

Clever people can copy the handwriting of an artist - it's like forging a person's signature.

I think, what has this day brought me, and what have I given it?

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

There are no permanent alliances, only permanent interests.

Of my death, tell them i have done my duty

To venture into space we must be strong-willed and determined. We must be fully committed to its exploration and discovery; space permits no half measures and is unforgiving of mistakes.

The idea that you can take smart but inexperienced 25-year-olds who never managed anything and turn them into effective managers via two years of classroom training is ludicrous.

We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Pedantry, in the common acceptation of the word, means an absurd ostentation of learning, and stiffness of phraseology, proceeding from a misguided knowledge of books and a total ignorance of men.

To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.