O. Henry Quotes

Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.

No one will ever get anywhere in this world unless he becomes a teacher, one who can show others how to do things.

Our human tendency is to be impatient with the person who cannot see the truth that is so plain to us. We must be careful that our impatience is not interpreted as condemnation or rejection.

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.

As for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top.

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

Friends are made for caring and sharing. Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

None can lead this life who are not almost amphibious.

I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.

When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.

As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.

Wherever you have planted a seed, I am prepared to expect wonders.

Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

It is serving God and others persistently with full heart and soul that turns testimony of truth into unbreakable spiritual strength.

This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.

We only see in a lifetime a dozen faces marked with the peace of a contented spirit.

Music never stops; it is only the listening that is intermittent.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

The law is a battery, which protects all that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside.

Some people are proud of their humility.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Don't worry about how inexperienced you are or think you are, but think about what, with the Lord's help, you can become.

I was obliged, at last, to come to the conclusion that the contemplation of nature alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart and mind.

Garden: One of a vast number of free outdoor restaurants operated by charity-minded amateurs in an effort to provide healthful, balanced meals for insects, birds and animals.

Fairway: a narrow strip of mown grass that separates two groups of golfers looking for lost balls in the rough.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

No one who really wants to count for God can afford to play at Christianity.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs.

The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.

The Universal Soul, as it is called, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering of cattle, and the draining of peat-meadows.

Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

Beautiful in form and feature, lovely as the day, can there be so fair a creature formed of common clay?

Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.

I was quite unable to make any white metal alloy hard enough to be made into powder by my machinery

Love is God's loaf; and this is that feeding for which we are taught to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread."

Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.

The highest condition of art is artlessness.

Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.