Bret Harte Quotations

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

A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.

Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.

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

But, when the goddess' work is done,The woman's still remains.

Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands, And of armèd men the hum; Lo, a nation's hosts have gathered Round the quick alarming drum Saying, Come, Freemen, Come! Ere your heritage be wasted, Said the quick alarming drum.

Each lost day has its patron saint!

Thiar ain't no sense In gittin' riled!

Crude at first [the short story] received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant - or a miracle of understatement

Which I wish to remark-- And my language is plain,-- That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

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

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

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

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.

Howbeit, though no scholar, I am not one of those who misuse the English speech, and, being foolishly led by the hasty custom of scriveners and printers to write the letters "T" and "H" joined together, which resembleth a "Y," do incontinently jump to the conclusion the THE is pronounced "Ye,"--the like of which I never heard in all England.

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

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

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...

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

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!'

Nobody shoulders a rifle in defense of a boarding house.

The dominant expression of a child is gravity.

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.

It may be broadly stated that.....of all animals kept for the recreation of mankind the horse is alone capable of exciting a passion that shall be absolutely hopeless.

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!

Besides writing, I have been teaching myself to 'develop' my own photographic plates, and I haven't a stick of clothing or an exposed finger that isn't stained. I sit for hours in a dark-room feeling as if I were a very elderly Faust at some dreadful incantation, and come out of it, blinding at the light, like a Bastille prisoner. And yet I am not successful!

The creator who could put a cancer in a believer's stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.

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

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.

A bird in the hand is a certainty, but a bird in the bush may sing.