O. Henry Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

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

O. Henry
My advice to you, if you should ever be in a hold up, is to line up with the cowards and save your bravery for an occasion when it may be of some benefit to you.

O. Henry
In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in its greatness.

O. Henry
Most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another.

O. Henry
If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

O. Henry
To a woman nothing seems quite impossible to the powers of the man she worships.

O. Henry
If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another's.

O. Henry
A holiday in a new dress—can earth offer anything more enchanting?

O. Henry
Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.

O. Henry
Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

O. Henry
Be always decent and right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent limit.

O. Henry
His mathematics carried with it a momentary qualm and a lesson. The thought had not occurred to him that the thought could possibly occur to me not to ride at his side on that red road to revenge and justice. It was the higher calculus. I was booked for the trail. I began to eat more beans.

O. Henry
Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.

O. Henry
By rights you're a king. If I was you, I'd call for a new deal.

O. Henry
We can't buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer.

O. Henry
They had on average, about a quarter of a suit of clothes and one shoe apiece. One chap was sitting on the floor of the aisle, looking as if he were working a hard sum in arithmetic. He was trying very solemn, to pull a lady's number two shoe on a number nine foot.

O. Henry
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.

O. Henry
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

O. Henry
What a woman wants is what you're out of. She wants more of a thing when it's scarce.

O. Henry
She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm — always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of the cling variety.

O. Henry
Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside.

O. Henry
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 — and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million."

O. Henry
There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.

O. Henry
Turn up the lights — I don't want to go home in the dark.

O. Henry
Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.

O. Henry
East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

O. Henry
In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.

O. Henry
The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.

O. Henry
Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

O. Henry
Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's.

O. Henry