Bret Harte Quotes

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

The inarticulate speak longest.

I don't want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in '45 Years,' and you don't really know what she's thinking, but you know something interesting is happening.

Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

Look at the fate of summer flowers, which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song.

In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

Beautiful things never last. That’s why fireflies flash.

Beauty is an accidental and transient good.

White means the strength of fragility and the fragility of the passage of time.

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

Beauty is at its most poignant when the cold hand of Death holds poised to wither it imminently.

Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late.

Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

Our self-trust is such a subtle thing that it still comes around whispering to us even after we are sure it is gone.

What is the point of having free speech if you have nothing to say?

The flowers of life are but visionary. How many pass away and leave no trace behind! How few yield any fruit,--and the fruit itself, how rarely does it ripen! And yet there are flowers enough; and is it not strange, my friend, that we should suffer the little that does really ripen to rot, decay, and perish unenjoyed?

No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

Give me an ear and I will give you a Voice.