Quotes from John Hay

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.

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.

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.

friends are the sunshine of life.

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.

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.

Friends are the sunshine of life.

Make all good men your well-wishers and then in the years' steady sifting some of them will turn into friends.