O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.

It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.

It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen — the census taker...

What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?

Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.

I have heard of you all my life. I know now what a scourge you have been to your country. Instead of killing fools you have been murdering the youth and genius that are necessary to make a people live and grow great.

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

Ford Madox Ford

It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.

All he desired in life was that…the girl, being five thousand miles away, would continue to love him. He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for nothing more.

Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness.

What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

Aleister Crowley

Love is the law, love under will.

Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out!

The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech; and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

The customer is usually wrong; but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so.

We know one thing only. Absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute direction, absolute simultaneity, absolute truth, all such ideas: they have not, and never can have, any real meaning.

The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas.

André Malraux

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves… is what I call hell.

No one can endure his own solitude.

The human mind invents its Puss-in-Boots and its coaches that change into pumpkins at midnight because neither the believer nor the atheist is completely satisfied with appearances.

If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?

Freedom is not an exchange — it is freedom.

Once the masterpiece has emerged, the lesser works surrounding it fall into place; and it then gives the impression of having been led up to and foreseeable, though actually it is inconceivable — or, rather, it can only be conceived of once it is there for us to see it.

All great religions stake a claim on eternity, but not necessarily on man's eternal life.

History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.

Art is a revolt against fate.

What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Walter de la Mare

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour—let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing.

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;
However rare—rare it be;
And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?

Some one came knocking
At my wee, small door;
Some one came knocking,
I’m sure—sure—sure.

"Is anybody there?" said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.

“Bunches of grapes,” says Timothy;
“Pomegranates pink,” says Elaine;
“A junket of cream and a cranberry tart
For me,” says Jane.

Édouard Manet

I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.

Conciseness in art is essential. The concise man makes one think.

One must be of one's time and paint what one sees.

You must always remain master of the situation and do what you please. No school tasks, ah, no! no tasks!

I never imagined that France could be represented by such doddering old fools, not excepting that little twit Thiers...

Only party hacks and the ambitious, the Henrys of this world following on the heels of the Milliéres, the grotesque imitators of the Commune of 1793... What an encouragement all these bloodthirsty caperings are for the arts! But there is at least one consolation in our misfortunes: that we're not politicians and have no desire to be elected as deputies.

Pablo Neruda

Someday, somewhere — anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.

Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed

I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.

I am alone with rickety materials,
the rain falls on me, and it is like me,
it is like me in its raving, alone in the dead world,
repulsed as it falls, and with no persistent form.

I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as a root and as a tomb,
as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses,
stiff with cold, dying with pain.

One pillar holding up consolations
And don’t bother telling me anything
And so? The pale metalloid heals you?
I have a terrible fear of being an animal.
And what if after so many words,
The anger that breaks a man down into boys.

Charles Lindbergh

Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.

Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.

Now, all that I feared would happen has happened. We are at war all over the world, and we are unprepared for it from either a spiritual or a material standpoint...

Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?

I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.

If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

Miguel de Cervantes

Time ripens all things. No man is born wise.

By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece.

Can we ever have too much of a good thing?

There's not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault.

Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies.

I must speak the truth, and nothing but the truth.

Let none presume to tell me that the pen is preferable to the sword.

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written.

Tomorrow will be a new day.

Fortune leaves always some door open to come at a remedy.

Take care, your worship, those things over there are not giants but windmills.

Let each man say what he chooses; if because of this I am criticized by the ignorant, I shall not be chastised by the learned.

An honest man's word is as good as his bond.

Abraham Lincoln

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.

I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.

The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.

We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.

Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

If any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others...

Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.