O. Henry Quotes
The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.
Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.
We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.
If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.
The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen.
The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting.
Are you in want of amusement nowadays? Then play a little at the game of getting a living. There was never anything equal to it. Do it temperately, though, and don't sweat.
What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.
The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization.
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.
The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkledtrophy.
It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.
There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. They are the heathen.
We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.
The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure.
Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.
The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field.
It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent.
Be not anxious to avoid poverty. In this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested.
Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.
Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.
I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.
What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.
Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.
When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.
To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.
Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.
