O. Henry Quotes

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad anddoes me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.

How many a poor immortal soul I have met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it [an oversized home].

I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.

I learned to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.

One puts into one's art what one has not been capable of putting into one's existence. It is because he was unhappy that God created the world.

The United States is evil.

Elvis lived here until thirteen and nobody can really take that from us!

The fundamental truth of democracy is the belief that the real pleasures of life are increased by sharing them.

The future, and the future alone, is the home of explanation.

Prevention of disease must become the goal of every physician.

A critic knows more than the author he criticizes, or just as much, or at least somewhat less.

Silence is the best substitute for brains ever invented.

Politics is like roller skating. You go partly where you want to go, and partly where the damn things take you.

It is still an open question as to whether mankind or insects shall ultimately inherit the earth. It is my opinion that mankind ... has about a 50-50 chance...

I could throw 56-pound words clear across the Grand Canyon. As a matter of course, I went into politics.

When I have to choose between voting for the people or the special interests, I always stick with the special interests. They remember. The people forget.

No man is fit to be a Senator...unless he is willing to surrender his political life for great principle.

We are at full stop. We think we have arrived.

Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious traveller. . .who always proportions his stay in any place.

However exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world.

Wine and youth are fire upon fire.

When I mention religion I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.

Nothing more aggravates ill success than the near approach of good.

To the composition of novels and romances, nothing is necessary but paper, pens, and ink, with the manual capacity of using them.

Life may as properly be called an art as any other.

What a silly fellow must he be who would do the devil's work for free.

for nothing can be more reasonable, than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them, which they themselves pay to all above them.

It is a good maxim to trust a person entirely or not at all.

Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates

A good heart will, at all times, betray the best head in the world.

Beauty may be the object of liking--great qualities of admiration--good ones of esteem--but love only is the object of love.

the excellence of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the author's skill in well dressing it up.

The dignity of history.

It is a trite but true definition that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.

There are those who never reason on what they should do, but what they have done; as if Reason had her eyes behind, and could only see backwards.

Though we may sometimes unintentionally bestow our beneficence on the unworthy, it does not take from the merit of the act. For charity doth not adopt the vices of its objects.

Lo, when two dogs are fighting in the streets, With a third dog one of the two dogs meets; With angry teeth he bites him to the bone, And this dog smarts for what that dog has done.

Guilt, on the contrary, like a base thief, suspects every eye that beholds him to be privy to his transgressions, and every tongue that mentions his name to be proclaiming them.

Petition me no petitions, sir, to-day; Let other hours be set apart for business. To-day it is our pleasure to be drunk; And this our queen shall be as drunk as we.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them.

Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.

Hairbreadth missings of happiness look like the insults of Fortune.

The exceptions of the scrupulous put one in mind of some general pardons where everything is forgiven except crimes.

Every physician almost hath his favourite disease.

Setting down in writing, is a lasting memory.

Some general officers should pay a stricter regard to truth than to call the depopulating other countries the service of their own.