Top 32 Quotes & Sayings by Bret Harte

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Bret Harte.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Bret Harte was an American short story writer and poet best remembered for short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he also wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials and magazine sketches. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. and later to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been those most often reprinted, adapted and admired.

American - Author | August 25, 1836 - May 5, 1902

Source: Wikipedia

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

Bret Harte

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

Bret Harte

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

Bret Harte

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

Bret Harte

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

Bret Harte

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

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

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

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.

Bret Harte

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

Bret Harte

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

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

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

Bret Harte

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

Bret Harte

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.

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

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.

Bret Harte

Nobody shoulders a rifle in defense of a boarding house.

Bret Harte

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!

Bret Harte

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.

Bret Harte

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

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

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

Bret Harte

Each lost day has its patron saint!

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

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

Bret Harte

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

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

Thiar ain't no sense In gittin' riled!

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

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

Bret Harte

The dominant expression of a child is gravity.

Bret Harte