John Hay Quotes

True luck consists not in holding the best of the cards at the table; luckiest is he who knows just when to rise and go home.

Make all good men your well-wishers, and then, in the years' steady sifting, Some of them turn into friends. Friends are the sunshine of life.

Speak with the speech of the world; think with the thoughts of the few.

What is first love worth, except to prepare for a second? What does second love bring? Only regret for the first.

There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.

At my door the Pale Horse stands to carry me to unknown lands.

The people will come to their own at last,-God is not mocked forever.

In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species?
We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem.

The best loved man or maid in the town would perish with anguish Could they hear all that their friends say in the course of a day.

There are three species of creatures who when they seem coming are going, when they seem going they come: diplomats, women, and crabs.

The wooing of those days was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches of an idler and more conventional age. It is related of one Stout, one of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently married, that he had one unfailing formula of courtship. He always promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should live in the timber where they could pick up their own firewood.

Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult matter.

Maidens! why should you worry in choosing whom you shall marry? Choose whom you may, you will find you have got somebody else.

And there, next to me, as the east wind blows in early fall, a season open to great migrations, are those lives, threading the air and waters of the sea, that come out of an incomparable darkness, which is also my own.

Love's Prayer If Heaven would hear my prayer, My dearest wish would be, Thy sorrows not to share But take them all on me; If Heaven would hear my prayer. I'd beg with prayers and sighs That never a tear might flow From out thy lovely eyes, If Heaven might grant it so; Mine be the tears and sighs. No cloud thy brow should cover, But smiles each other chase From lips to eyes all over Thy sweet and sunny face; The clouds my heart should cover. That all thy path be light Let darkness fall on me; If all thy days be bright, Mine black as night could be; My love would light my night. For thou art more than life, And if our fate should set Life and my love at strife, How could I then forget I love thee more than life?

It would never occur to most of us that 'plants' say anything at all, except in terms of what we read into them, or try to use them for. Yet in their responses to this wonderfully rhythmic and varying earth they are the most expressive of all forms of life.

friends are the sunshine of life.