O. Henry Quotes

I could use a hundred people who don't know there is such a word as impossible.

To be good is not enough; a man must be good for something

A man ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that he renders.

America is not a land of money but of wealth-not a land of rich people, but of successful workers.

In my mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. None of us has any right to ease. There is no place in civilization for the idler.

I wouldn't give five cents for all the art in the world.

At that point the child is eligible for adoption and can be placed with a family that can love the child and can raise the child.

Every piece of work in the shops moves. Save 10 steps a day for each of the 12,000 employees, and you will have saved 50 miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.

If you think you can, or if u think you can't.. Either way ur correct... It's the thinking that makes it so.

A scrip on my back, and a staff in my hand, I march on in haste through an enemy's land; The road may be rough, but it cannot be long; And I'll smooth it with hope, and I'll cheer it with song.

I need thy presence every passing hour; What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power?

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.

As it is with an individual, so it is with a nation. One must produce to have, or one will become a have-not.

For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong.

If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free.

Unless there be correct thought, there cannot be any action, and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.

How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?

Social progress makes the well-being of all more and more the business of each.

The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man's income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase.

Use soft words in hard arguments.

He who commences many things finishes but few.

Collective freedom is one devoid of material bondage and one that supports the institutions necessary for democracy.

Youth are no longer the place where society reveals its dreams.

I do now most heartily desire to live but to exalt Jesus; to live preaching and to die preaching; to preach to perishing sinners till I drop down dead.

After fifty, one ceases to digest. As someone once said, "I just ferment my food now."

At my public school I had hated every other face for fear the owner was a lord, at university, I was to court the rich while doubting whether there should be great inequalities between incomes.

Science progresses not because scientists as a whole are passionately open-minded but because different scientists are passionately closed-minded about different things.

Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.

Modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way - both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced.

Libertarians are learning to their sorrow that big businessmen cannot necessarily be relied upon to be their allies in the battle against extension of governmental encroachments.

A hundred welfare programs, spending more and more billions, lead to chronic budget deficits, which lead to increased paper-money issues, which lead to higher prices.

The mind is never more highly gratified than in contemplating a natural landscape.

While I'm here on this planet, I really want to create art and do creative things.

by and by, the cause of my disease Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting, When that I think what grief it is again To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.

Alas, so all things now do hold their peace: Heaven and earth disturbed in no thing: The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease; The nightes chare the stars about doth bring.

In the sometimes ridiculous action scenarios you're laughing out loud, and so the more committed and in fact the more highbrow the music is, the funnier it is.

Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.

To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

All intimacies are based on differences.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.

If you haven't had your life what have you had?

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.