Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.
Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.
It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, ‘He was a man who didn’t believe in violence, He’s a good man… and dead.
The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.
The Apache don’t have a word for love,” he said. “Know what they both say at the marriage? The squaw-taking ceremony?””Tell me.””Varlebena. It means forever. That’s all they say.
The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.
Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.
Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.
It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.
Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.
It means little to anybody but us. We set store by kinfolk. We’ve our troubles from time to time, but when one of us is in danger, there’ll be help from any who are around.
Personally, I do not believe the human mind has any limits but those we impose ourselves.
Because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king.
Many a small man is considered good while he remains small, but let power come to him, and he becomes a raging fury.
Our world is made up of a myriad of microcosms, of tiny worlds, each with its own habitues, every one known to the others.
You would be wise” he agreed, “To go to Cordoba or Toledo. The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is forever.
I’m sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it!””You will hate the next place, too,” I said. “What you are you will carry with you.
…he’d had the foresight to know that a lot of the savages wear store-bought clothes.
When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.
The wealthy and satisfied do not migrate, they stagnate.
If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
Now, tomorrow Miss Laurie McCrae and me, we have an appointment with a sky pilot who will make it proper for us to travel in double harness.
Never can tell when you might come on somebody needs skinning.
…if we are to become a land of homes and people, evil men must not be allowed to persist in their evil.
Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that.
…the way I figure, no man has the right to be ignorant. In a country like this, ignorance is a crime. If a man is going to vote, if he’s going to take part in his country and its government, then it’s up to him to understand.
I’ve noticed…that whenever a man is asked to be realistic he is being asked to betray something in which he believes. It is the favorite argument of those who believe that only the end matters, not the means.
Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees.
People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.
Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
People have a greater tolerance for evil than for violence. If crooked gamboling, thieving and robing are covered over folks will tolerate it longer than out right violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.
violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.
I’ve a regard for law, although I do not always agree with it. Without law, man becomes a beast.
It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.
I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label.
She’d never been one to think in terms of years, anyway. A person was what they were, and many a man at forty was sixty in his ways and many another was twenty and would never grow past it.
No man is a complete ruler or dictator. He is only the mouthpiece for the wishes of his followers. As long as he expresses those wishes, he leads them.
I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief.
A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first
If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
To live in a city, one must be larger than one’s environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.
A man shares his days with hunger thirst and cold with the good times and the bad and the first part of being a man is to understand that.
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.
You can’t fight the desert… you have to ride with it.
To exist is to adapt and if one could not adapt one died and made room for those who could.
A body shouldn’t heed what might be. He’s got to do with what is.
Men strive for peace but it is their enemies that give them strength and I think if man no longer had enemies he would have to invent them for his strength only grows from struggle.
Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.
What a man wants to do he generally can do if he wants to badly enough.
Any man can shoot a gun and with practice he can draw fast and shoot accurately but that makes no difference. What counts is how you stand up when somebody is shooting back at you.
To disbelieve is easy to scoff is simple to have faith is harder.
A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he’s never been any place or done anything.
Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers for each rage leaves him less than he had been before-it takes something from him.
Revenge could steal a man’s life until there was nothing left but emptiness.
A man can lose sight of everything else when he’s bent on revenge and it ain’t worth it.
Man needs so little … yet he begins wanting so much.
He might never really do what he said but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go.
The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me and nothing before me but hope.
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
He never knew when he was whipped … so he never was.
There was a Texas Ranger one time who said that there’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps a-coming.
One thing we learned. To make a start and keep plugging. When I had fights at school the little while I went I just bowed my neck and kept swinging until something hit the dirt. Sometimes it was me but I always got up.
Being scared can keep a man from getting killed and often makes a better fighter of him.
There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man.
A body shouldn’t heed what might be. He’s got to do with what is.
I am somebody. I am me. I like being me. And I need nobody to make me somebody.
I would not sit waiting for some value tomorrow nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime. … I would make something happen.
Pa he always said a man had to look spry for himself because nobody would do it for him your opportunities didn’t come knocking around you had to hunt them down and hog-tie them.
Pa he always said a man had to look spry for himself because nobody would do it for him your opportunities didn’t come knocking around you had to hunt them down and hog-tie them.
Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today that I shall be tomorrow.
For you and me today is all we have tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.
I fear there will be no future for those who do not change.
Few of us ever live in the present we are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
This-this was what made life: a moment of quiet the water falling in the fountain the girl’s voice … a moment of captured beauty. He who is truly wise will never permit such moments to escape.
Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now hold your ground and later win a little more.
It is better to have no emotion when it is work. Do what needs to be done and do it coolly.
A wise man fights to win but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.
Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy.
The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.
Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.
The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.
Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before – it takes something from him.
No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.