O. Henry Quotes

I never knew that ["Hank Zipzer"] would happen in my life. It is one of the greatest things. It is like a gift from God.

In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

I believe that everything in Nature aspires to the acme of strength, well-being, and happiness; and everything that deviates from this I call immoral.

Love is the heart s immortal thirst to be completely known and all forgiven.

Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.

This is the soldier brave enough to tellThe glory-dazzled world that "war is hell":Lover of peace, he looks beyond the strife,And rides through hell to save his country's life.

The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.

A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired.

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

Most people think of success in terms of getting; success, however, begins in terms of giving.

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion

Greatest thing we can produce is character. Everything else can be taken from us, but not our character.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

Yea, though the breath of disappointment should chill the sanguine heart, Speedily gloweth it again, warmed by the live embers of hope.

It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

Riches without charity are nothing worth. They are a blessing only to him who makes them a blessing to others.

Tell the truth so as to puzzle and confound your adversaries.

It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.

No man is so poor as to have nothing worth giving.

It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

One must overcome history by dogma.

The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.

Our success in influencing or elevating others is in proportion to their belief in our belief in them.

There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.

The real solution to the problem of poverty consists in finding how to increase the employment and earning power of the poor.

A young critic is like a boy with a gun; he fires at every living thing he sees. He thinks only of his own skill, not of the pain he is giving.

I suggest that what we want to do is not to leave to posterity a great institution, but to leave behind a great tradition of journalism ably practiced in our time.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

People of a lively imagination are generally curious, and always so when a little in love.

To be deep in history, is to cease to be Protestant.

The world of the 20th century, if it is to come to life in any viability of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American century.

There are so many women on the floor of Congress, it looks like a mall

The law exists to protect the weak from the strong.

An angel visited the green earth, and took a flower away.

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

You can manage your sin, but that's not repentance.

You would think that everyone would leap at the chance to get rid of sin. Not so. They want relief not a cure.

Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

Women are a new race, recreated since the world received Christianity.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark

Get it - get it better or get it worse. No middle ground of compromise.

I was determined to know beans.