9 Quotes & Sayings By John Hay

John Hay was a noted 19th-century American diplomat and writer. He was United States Secretary of State in the administration of President William McKinley. Hay was also a prolific and popular writer of fiction and nonfiction, especially fiction set in the American West. Born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he attended private schools in his home state and then enrolled at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania Read more

After spending two years there, he transferred to Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from college in 1854 and then began studying law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School before turning to writing full-time. He practiced law for a few years without much success and then turned his attention fully to writing and public speaking.

In 1856 he married Frances Folsom, who died one year later. In 1857 he married Clara Harris, with whom he had four daughters—Elizabeth Porter, Clara Hay, Frances Harris Hay, and Sarah Harris Hay—and one son, John Bancroft Stockton Hay.

1
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. John Hay
2
This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light. John Hay
3
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
4
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
5
True luck consists not in holding the best cards at the table luckiest he who knows just when to rise and go home. John Hay
6
Friends are the sunshine of life. John Hay
7
Make all good men your well-wishers and then in the years' steady sifting some of them will turn into friends. John Hay
8
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