O. Henry Quotes

Character is the impulse reined down into steady continuance.

There is always the possibility of beauty where there is an unsealed human eye; of music where there is an unstopped human ear; and of inspiration where there is a receptive human spirit.

Genius does not care much for a set of explicit regulations, but that does not mean that genius is lawless.

Earthly pride is like the passing flower, that springs to fall, and blossoms but to die.

Poetry has been to me something more than amusement, it has been a cheering companion when I had no other to fly to, a delightful solace.

Never build after you are five and forty; have five years' income in hand before you lay a brick; and always calculate the expense at double the estimate.

My sin is the black spot which my bad act makes, seen against the disk of the Sun of Righteousness. Hence religion and sin come and go together.

Pity is not enough better than indifference to benefit materially either agent or recipient.

Faith is mind at its best, its bravest, and its fiercest. Faith is thought become poetry, and absorbing into itself the soul's great, passions. Faith is intellect carried up to its transfigurement.

Dirt is matter in the wrong place.

What is merit? The opinion one man entertains of another.

We have no permanent allies, only permanent interests.

The old echoes are long in dying.

Hello. My name is Henry. I am a fan. Somewhere in the late 1980s’, I got tired of people telling me to get a life. I wrote a book instead

Life's to short for chess.

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.

We are religious by nature.

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

It is all a mistake that we cannot be good and manly without being scrupulously and studiously good. There is too much mechanism about our virtue.

I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.

I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated, because a woman can’t think for herself

I've never quite understood the idea of a "season." Whenever an artistic director says to me, 'I have this slot,' I always start to feel we're parking cars or something.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

Put your life's plan into determined action and go after what you want with all that's in you.

Love people and serve them.

You can't sit on the lid of progress. If you do, you will be blown to pieces.

Talent is some one faculty unusually developed; genius commands all the faculties.

You cannot fathom your mind.... The more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful it will be.

Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.

Make Hamilton Bamilton, make Douglas Puglas, make Percy Bercy, and Stanley Tanley and where would be the long-resounding march and energy divine of the roll-call of the peerage?

If your news must be bad, tell it soberly and promptly.