O. Henry Quotes

There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

They had been brought up in the School of Hard Knocks.

How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!

I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with a few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing...You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish

Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

We live in a vale of tears...We can have all the dreams we like, but life is hard, implacable, sad.

I've often felt that life is a hard deal and it's unrelentingly tragic and an uphill fight.

Every person you meet is waging his or her own war against a callous universe that is plotting against them.

Trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment; there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love. - The shores of existence are strewn with them.

I have learned there is no joy without hardship. There is no pleasure without pain. Would we know the comfort of peace without the distress of war?

The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.

Whatever hardships there have been in my life I still live in a very privileged position. Fear is not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Fear is seeing a child get hurt. Fear is watching someone you love waste away. Fear is knowing you are going to die yourself. But there's no fear in what I do. I write books.

Great things come out of being hungry and cold. Once you're pampered, you get lazy.

I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.

We were very poor and my family lost everything during the war - our home and our identity. But I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

No, I was two years older than the other guys. I was a war baby. My family were a lot poorer than they were. I'd had to fight too hard for anything I had in my life and to smash things up for me.

The war years were the most difficult time of my life. There was real famine in Moscow. The water froze inside the houses. There was no heat.

As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.