O. Henry Quotes

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!

Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

I've struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can't live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.

I have lived too long in foreign parts

Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.

Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.

The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.

Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation.

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.

People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

The gardener's rule applies to youth and age: When young 'sow wild oats'; but when old, grow sage.

Law is stable the societies we are speaking of are progressive. The greater or less happiness of a people depends on the degree of promptitude with which the gulf is narrowed.

The Roman Code was merely an enunciation in words of the existing customs of the Roman people.

There has never been a time when there has been no person in Cornwall without a knowledge of the Cornish language.

The whole object of my life has been to inculcate into Cornish people a sense of their Cornishness.

For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature.

I don't feel that I view things with a pessimistic eye. I should try to say which way events will go rather than which way events should go. We have to be realistic.

I do sense that the financial system is under the gun. In order to keep our system and economies moving globally, there's the need to extend new money.

The past is dead, and has no resurrection.

We should teach our children to make friends with us, to communicate all their thoughts to us ... by this we find many opportunities of teaching them important truths, almost without knowing.

Goodness, Time's rude hand defies, And winter lives when beauty dies.

I, a Laconian dog, can bite again: Yes, I can make the Daunian tiger flee, Much more a bragging, foul-mouth'd whelp like thee.

So, on the eastern summit, clad in gray, morn, like a horseman girt for travel, comes, and from his tower of mist night's watchman hurries down.

And care, whom not the gayest can outbrave, Pursues its feeble victim to the grave.

Christianity is not a mere set of opinions to be embraced by understanding. It is the work of the heart as well as the head.