John Hay Quotes

#1. 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.

John Hay

#2. 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.

John Hay

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

John Hay

#4. 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.

John Hay

#5. I think that saving a little child And bringing him to his own, Is a derned sight better business Than loafing around the throne.

John Hay

#6. Break not the rose; its fragrance and beauty are surely sufficient, resting contented with these, never a thorn shall you feel.

John Hay

#7. 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.

John Hay

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

John Hay

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

John Hay

#10. Unto each man comes a day when his favorite sins all forsake him, And he complacently thinks he has forsaken his sins.

John Hay

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

John Hay

#12. 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.

John Hay

#13. The use of proverbs is characteristic of an unlettered people. They are invaluable treasures to dunces with good memories.

John Hay

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

John Hay

#15. friends are the sunshine of life.

John Hay

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

John Hay

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

John Hay

#18. 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.

John Hay