Bret Harte Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

Never a tear bedims the eye that time and patience will not dry.

Bret Harte
Never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again.

Bret Harte
Don't be too quick
To break bad habits: better stick,
Like the Mission folk, to your arsenic.

Bret Harte
For the glory born of Goodness Never dies, And its flag is not half-masted In the skies.

Bret Harte
Speak, O man, less recent! Fragmentary fossil! Primal pioneer of Pliocene formation, Hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum Of volcanic tufa!

Bret Harte
Love differs from all the other contagious diseases: the last time a man is exposed to it, he takes it most readily, and has it the worst!

Bret Harte
But still when the mists of doubt prevail,
And we lie becalmed by the shores of age,
We hear from the misty troubled shore
The voce of children gone before.
Drawing the soul to its anchorage.

Bret Harte
Give me a man that is capable of a devotion to anything, rather than a cold, calculating average of all the virtues!

Bret Harte
Your voices break and falter in the darkness, Break, falter, and are still.

Bret Harte
He coils in the ooze and the drip Like a thong idly flung from the slave-driver's whip.

Bret Harte
The delicate thought, that cannot find expression, For ruder speech too fair, That, like thy petals, trembles in possession, And scatters on the air.

Bret Harte
When folks find I ain't afeard to speak my mind on their affairs, they kinder guess I'm tellin' the truth about my own.

Bret Harte
One big vice in a man is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.

Bret Harte
I'll show thee the sinuous track By the slow-moving annelid made, Or the trilobite, that, farther back, In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid. Thou shalt see, in his Jurassic tomb, The plesiosaurus embalmed; In his oolitic prime and his bloom, Iguanodon, safe and unharmed!

Bret Harte
Perhaps there is no gift of nature that requires as little exertion on the part of the owner as personal beauty. I am not certain but that it is this very absence of effort which excites our admiration.

Bret Harte
It would seem evident, therefore, that the secret of the American short story was the treatment of characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its method...

Bret Harte
Well, no offense:
Thar ain't no sense
In gittin' riled.

Bret Harte
And he says that the mountains are fairer
For once being held in your thought;

Bret Harte
And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.

Bret Harte
Tell the boys I've got the Luck with me now.

Bret Harte
All you know about it [luck] for certain is that it's bound to change.

Bret Harte
Virtue always meets reward,
But quicker when it wears a sword;

Bret Harte
If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, 'It might have been,'
More sad are these we daily see:
'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'

Bret Harte
If I looked as good as Justin Chamo Spear I would look in the mirror too

Bret Harte
There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is Death,

Bret Harte
Behind the curtain's mystic fold
The glowing future lies unrolled.

Bret Harte
And then, for an old man like me, it's not exactly right,
This kind o' playing soldier with no enemy in sight.

Bret Harte
And on that grave where English oak and holly
And laurel wreaths entwine
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,—
This spray of Western pine!

Bret Harte
Later, when we were forced to accept the fact that finding gold was really the primary object of a gold-mining company, we still remained there

Bret Harte
Beneath this tree lies the body of John Oakhurst, who struck a streak of bad luck on the 23rd of November, 1850, and handed in his checks on the 7th of December, 1850.

Bret Harte