O. Henry Quotes
Freedom is like health, it is taken for granted while one has it. One becomes aware of it when it has gone.
The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought - not by the rising and setting of the sun.
Intelligence increases mere physical ability one half. The use of the head abridges the labor of the hands.
God has made sleep to be a sponge by which to rub out fatigue. A man's roots are planted in night as in a soil.
You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
When God thought of mother, He must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly - so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception.
Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy.
It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work; it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.
What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty.
No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.
We are apt to believe in Providence so long as we have our own way; but if things go awry, then we think, if there is a God, he is in heaven, and not on earth.
That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life.
Let the GRATEFUL HEART sweep through the day that it may recognize in every hour some sweet blessing.
God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.
All the wide world is but the husbandry of God for the development of the one fruit-man.
The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.
A man's ledger does not tell what he is, or what he is worth. Count what is in man, not what is on him, if you would know what he is worth-whether rich or poor.
If we would have anything of benefit, we must earn it, and earning it become shrewd, inventive, ingenious, active, enterprising.
Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body.
Troubles loom up big when they're ahead, And joys seem always sweeter when they're past.
To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and God lets him wrestle with it as best he may.
I have known many an instance of a man writing a letter and forgetting to sign his name, but this is the only instance I have ever known of a man signing his name and forgetting to write the letter.
A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot; and yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, she reaped what she had sown.
Some people are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month and it would not get through their skins.
Many men are stored full of unused knowledge. Like loaded guns that are never fired off, or military magazines in times of peace, they are stuffed with useless ammunition.
Laugh at your friends, And if your friends are sore; So much the better, You may laugh the more.
Some men think that the globe is a sponge that God puts into their hands to squeeze for their own garden or flower-pot.
Every boy wants someone older than himself to whom he may go in moods of confidence and yearning. The neglect of this child's want by grown people . . . is a fertile source of suffering.
Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.
None love to speak so much, when the mood of speaking comes, as they who are naturally taciturn.
Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe-a fairy dome of splendid architecture.