Top 140 O. Henry Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “No friendship is an accident.”

— O. Henry

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

— O. Henry

3. “If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life.”

— O. Henry

4. “Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”

— O. Henry

5. “Write what you like; there is no other rule.”

— O. Henry

6. “Bolivar cannot carry double.”

— O. Henry

7. “O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.”

— O. Henry

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

— O. Henry

9. “Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.”

— O. Henry

10. “The magi, as you know, were wise men wonderfully wise men who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents.”

— O. Henry

11. “A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.”

— O. Henry

12. “I’ll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.”

— O. Henry

13. “Women’s weapon, water-drops.”

— O. Henry

14. “We can’t buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer.”

— O. Henry

15. “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

16. “In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called “places.”

— O. Henry

17. “There is no well defined boundary line between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in the one domain and sometimes in the other.”

— O. Henry

18. “There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.”

— O. Henry

19. “You can’t appreciate home till you’ve left it, money till it’s spent, your wife till she’s joined a woman’s club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.”

— O. Henry

20. “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

21. “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

— O. Henry

22. “Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!”

— O. Henry

23. “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

24. “Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling – something.”

— O. Henry

25. “Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far.”

— O. Henry

26. “Those whom we first love we seldom marry.”

— O. Henry

27. “All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another’s presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best.”

— O. Henry

28. “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.”

— O. Henry

29. “Eight dollars a week or a million a year – what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer.”

— O. Henry

30. “Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.”

— O. Henry

31. “It gives men courage and ambition and the nerve for anything. It has the colour of gold, is clear as a glass and shines after dark as if the sunshine were still in it.”

— O. Henry

32. “The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.”

— O. Henry

33. “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”

— O. Henry

34. “I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.”

— O. Henry

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

— O. Henry

36. “One dollar and eighty-seven cents.”

— O. Henry

37. “And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.”

— O. Henry

38. “All great men have declared that they owe their sucess to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.”

— O. Henry

39. “Will you buy my hair?”

— O. Henry

40. “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

41. “Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage.”

— O. Henry

42. “Pennies saved one and two at a time.”

— O. Henry

43. “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

44. “Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat – seamy on both sides.”

— O. Henry

45. “Give me a cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner’s Self-Instructor for the Banjo, and I’ll join you.”

— O. Henry

46. “The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle- making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen.”

— O. Henry

47. “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

48. “Whenever he saw a dollar in another man’s hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn’t take it any other way.”

— O. Henry

49. “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

50. “It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are.”

— O. Henry