O. Henry Quotes

Minicars produce miniprofits.

A big business never becomes big by being a narrow society looking after only the interests of its organization and stockholders.

The man who is too set to change is dead already. The funeral is a mere detail.

The human race cannot forever exist half-exploiters and half-exploited.

Writing is the only profession where nobody considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. Money is like an arm or a leg; use it or lose it.

No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between a man and a plot of land.

We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.

Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.

Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.

An inch in a man's nose is much.

The lawyer's pouch is a mouth of hell.

Good luck reaches farther than long arms.

Business and action strengthen the brain, but too much study weakens it.

Public problems collapse into the limited and depoliticized register of private issues.

Young people refuse the notion that financialization defines the only acceptable definition of exchange, one that is based exclusively on the reductionist notion of buying and selling.

Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.

If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.

Beauty loses its relish; the graces never.

Seldom do we talk of ourselves with success. If I condemn myself, more is believed than is expressed; if I praise myself, much less.

How sweet a thing it is to love and to be loved again.

I swim. I do a little bit of surfing. I would say I'm a beginner at surfing. I run. I cycle. I play a little bit of soccer.

Wouldn't you like to have heard the voice of Shakespeare, or Jesus Christ?

I think that American salesmanship can be a weapon more powerful than the atomic bomb.

It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.

Art without life is a poor affair.

When I am wicked I am in high spirits.

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

Keep making the movements of life.

In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.

The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.

England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.

Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.

Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.

She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.

Instill respect for teachers.

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.

Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

I was always interested in curing the brain.

The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.

Imagination is the voice of the daring.

The history of the world is the history of the privileged few.

Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest.

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.

I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic.