O. Henry Quotes

I think of the thrill of an intelligent woman talking just to me.

We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

As you do with any band you're in, you get to know everyone too well all too soon. When you're crammed into a small space, proximity leads to familiarity.

If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.

Sleep is for squares.

The air is crowded with birds -- beautiful, tender, intelligent birds -- to whom life is a song.

The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.

Don’t think about it. Do it. Don’t talk about it. Do it.

If you listen to 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,' by Gil Scott-Heron, that album is dripping with rage.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

My feelings for you shame me into silence.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment

The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!

Being is the great explainer.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth.

The month of November makes me feel that life is passing more quickly. In an effort to slow it down, I try to fill the hours more meaningfully.

I can't remember that I ever had just a minute of stage fright.

I’m packed with broken glass and memories and it all hurts.

If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

When a man truly commits, the universe will conspire to assure his success.

Many runners worry about who is in the race, or they think about the time they must run to win. I only try to run as fast as I am capable - nothing less.

The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.

In form and feature, face and limb, I grew so like my brother That folks got taking me for him And each for one another. For one of us was born a twin And not a soul knew which. . . .

No deeply rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse judgment. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic.

Everyone, especially minorities of race and ethnicity, now live under a surveillance panoptican.

The fire of my adversity has purged the mass of my acquaintance.

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

After big storms there follow bright days.

I started with shoes, and with hard work and discipline, the business prospered. I moved to the department store business and again, things went well.

As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

My own interest in basic aspects of electron transfer between metal complexes became active only after I came to the University of Chicago in 1946.

Logical thinking will not be enough to get answers to the questions that matter most in life. We need revelation from God.

TRUST in GOD and then GO and DO.

Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual. For ambition, even of this quality, is but a form of self-love.

If you know how a man deals with his money, how he gets it, spends it, keeps it, shares it, you know one of the most important things about him.

Of all the uses of adversity which are sweet, none are sweeter than those which grow out of disappointed love.

Advantage is a better soldier than rashness.

A young trooper should have an old horse.

Write while the heat is in you.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

The soul, by an instinct stronger than reason, ever associates beauty with truth.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.