O. Henry Quotes
A word that has been said may be unsaid-it is but air. But when a deed is done, it cannot be undone, nor can our thoughts reach out to all the mischiefs that may follow.
Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives whom we call dead.
Profits are part of the mechanism by which society decides what it wants to see produced.
Debt rolls a man over and over, binding him hand and foot, and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until the long-legged interest devours him.
A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation's young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung.
The best lessons a man ever learns are from his mistakes. It is not for want of schoolmasters that we are still ignorant.
The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God's thought and hand, is our own soul!
I beseech you to correct one fault - severe speech of others; never speak evil of any man, no matter what the facts may be.
Some folks think that Christianity means a kind of insurance policy, and that it has little to do with this life, but that it is a very good thing when a man dies.
As flowers always wear their own colors and give forth their own fragrance every day alike, so should Christians maintain their character at all times and under all circumstances.
No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant.
Every man is full of music; but it is not every man that knows how to bring it out.
Many of our troubles are God dragging us, and they would end if we would stand upon our feet and go whither He would have us go.
The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty.
No grief has a right to immortality. That ground belongs to joy, to hope, to faith.
There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.
Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.
Indifference in religion is more fatal than skepticism. There is no pulse in indifference; skepticism may have warm blood.
Affliction comes to us all ...not to impoverish, but to enrich us, as the plough enriches the field; to multiply our joy, as the seed, by planting, is multiplied a thousand-fold.
If Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God in the experience of those who trust and love Him, there needs no further argument of His divinity.
The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.
There is no harder shield for the devil to pierce with temptation than singing with prayer.
Unfruitful emotion is to be suspected. Feeling acts as an impulse, as a spur, as a spring, and when feelings are excited, and they put nothing forward, they are sometimes even dangerous to a man.
No man ever learned to love God with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself, in a day.
It is necessary, if one would read aright, that he should read at least two newspapers, representing both sides of important subjects.
Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities.
They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.
It is a very good world for the purposes for which it was built; and that is all anything is good for.
In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.
If you have only two or three things that you can enjoy and they are things which time and decay may remove from you, what are you going to do in old age?
If there's a job to be done, I always ask the busiest man in my parish to take it on and it gets done.