O. Henry Quotes

Reason can tell how love affects us, but cannot tell what love is.

Reason is a permanent blessing of God to the soul. Without it there can be no large religion.

Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's life happens to be placed. It shows how much good men require of us.

What could make me love my fellow Christian better than to see that God loves us all as we were all one soul?

Christians should be like a flower store: the odor of sanctity should betray them wherever they are.

It takes a man to make a devil; and the fittest man for such a purpose is a snarling, waspish, red-hot, fiery creditor.

When the old creeds are threadbare, and worn through, And all too narrow for the broadening soul, Give me the fine, firm texture of the new, Fair, beautiful and whole!

Education will not come of itself; it will never come unless you seek it; it will not come unless you take the first steps which lead to it; but, taking these steps, every man can acquire it.

It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.

Next to the pastoral came the agricultural life. When you add to that the manufacturing phase of development, society begins to fill out, and needs but wings to fly, and commerce is its wings.

The writer's Queen Victoria is his public, and he would do well to keep a bust of the old Queen on his desk with the legend "We are not amused" hanging from it.

I don't think everybody has a right to a weapon which can be used to kill innocent people and maybe threaten the life of a president of the United States.

While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden [military] coffers, Americas schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures.

Americans are sick and tired of political gamesmanship.

The routine promotion of condoms through advertising has been stopped by networks who are so hypocritically priggish that they refuse to describe disease control as they promote disease transmission.

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they dont fit in with normal, healthy people.

Education must be aimed at creating a wider imagination in the child, not at suppressing. The childs mind must be set free.

All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me.

Keep a secret, it's your slave. Tell it, and it's your master.

How we learn has nothing to do with how brilliant we are.

In school, I was an underachiever.

I don't understand what I do, I just know that it's great.

When you love what you do, then you're talking to one of the luckiest guys on the face of the earth.

Wyoming is good, but Montana is like heaven on earth.

The strangest thing [to sign] has to be parts of [fan's] anatomy. But mostly female.

Everyone if so warm, and the children know my from the children's books. Their oldest siblings or young parents know me from "Here Comes the Groom" or "Waterboy."

There is a whole other generation that knows me from "Arrested Development" "Scream" and, of course, "Happy Days."

Somebody said, 'Hey, there is a lull in your career. Why don't you write books about your [dyslexia]?' We are currently writing our 34th novel.

The Queen of England gave me the honor of the Order of the British Empire for working with children.

I have all over the country and all over the world. It is an honor for me to meet the fans, a blessing.

I rode it once, which was up the driveway in the opening credits of the show. I didn't know how to stop it. I actually nearly killed the director of photography, and I smashed into the sound truck.

Take heed of thinking. The farther you go from the church of Rome, the nearer you are to God.

The itch of disputation will prove the scab of the Church.

Who God doth late and early pray, More of his grace than gifts to send, And entertains the harmless day With a well-chosen book or friend.

The problem of abolishing want is not a problem in division, as the politicians so often aver; it is a problem of multiplication.

It is important to bear in mind the now commonly accepted fact that in its primitive stages, religion had nothing to do with morals as understood by us today.

A child of the new generation Refused to learn multiplication. He said 'Don't conclude That I'm stupid or rude; I am simply without motivation.'

The best person able to appraise promise as a mathematician is a gifted teacher, and not a professional tester.

Being appointed Elder Professor meant very much taking over the shop, in that the professor in those days controlled all the moneys.

The real illness of the American city today, and especially of the deprived groups within it, is voicelessness.

The Negro revolt is not aimed at winning friends but at winning freedom, not interpersonal warmth but institutional justice.

The common characteristics of people make a community possible, but it is their uncommon qualities that make it better.

Particular individuals do not recur, but their building blocks do.

Looking back to data, we can see if the consequences are plausible; looking forward to theory, we can see if general principles are suggested.

This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems.

From the point of view of physics, it is a miracle that [seven million New Yorkers are fed each day] without any control mechanism other than sheer capitalism.

The measure of performance of any given agent is the amount of money it accumulates through its actions.

When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations.

The multiplier effect is a major feature of networks and flows. It arises regardless of the particular nature of the resource, be it goods, money, or messages.

An academical system without the personal influence of teachers on pupils, is an arctic winter; it will create an icebound, petrified, cast-iron University, and nothing else.