O. Henry Quotes
Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.
Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors.
Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.
Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life.
When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.
Nothing can compare in beauty, and wonder, and admirableness, and divinity itself, to the silent work in obscure dwellings of faithful women bringing their children to honor and virtue and piety.
Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster.
Nature would be scarcely worth a puff of the empty wind if it were not that all Nature is but a temple, of which God is the brightness and the glory.
Men who neglect Christ, and try to win heaven through moralities, are like sailors at sea in a storm, who pull, some at the bowsprit and some at the mainmast, but never touch the helm.
Nothing is orderly till man takes hold of it. Everything in creation lies around loose.
His nature is such that our often coming does not tire him. The whole burden of the whole life of every man may be rolled on to God and not weary him, though it has wearied man.
Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.
Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men; but pride in its original function, for which God created it, is indispensable to a proper manhood.
A practical, matter-of-fact man is like a wagon without springs: every single pebble on the road jolts him; but a man with imagination has springs that break the jar and jolt.
Like waves, our feelings may continue by repeating themselves, by intermittent rushes; but no emotion any more than a wave can long retain its own individual form.
Morality is good, and is accepted of God, as far as it goes; but the difficulty is, it does not go far enough.
God made every man to have power to be mightier than the events round about him; to hold by his firm will the reigns by which all things are guided.
The whole of the Saviour's ministerial life, at least the part of it that stands on record, was passed in what we may call substantially a revival work.
We under no circumstances know the appreciate of your parent till we develop into dad and mom ourselves.
No one can deal with the hearts of men unless he has the sympathy which is given by love.
Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground.
Evil men of every degree will use you, flatter you, lead you on until you are useless; then, if the virtuous do not pity you, or God compassionate, you are without a friend in the universe.
Weak minds may be injured by novel-reading; but sensible people find both amusement and instruction therein.
Not that which men do worthily, but that which they do successfully, is what history makes haste to record.
The methods by which men have met and conquered trouble, or been slain by it, are the same in every age.
There's not much practical Christianity in the man who lives on better terms with angels and seraphs than with his children, servants and neighbours.
Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so various, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.
A door that seems to stand open must be of a man's size, or it is not the door that providence means for him.
If a man has come to that point where he is no content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state in which he ought to be changed into a mummy.
There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtue, to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them.
Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?
Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.
The prouder a man is, the more he thinks he deserves, and the more he thinks he deserves, the less he really does deserve.