Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.
Actors, politicians, and writers-all of us are but creatures of the hour. Long-lasting fame comes to but few.
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 man can learn a lot if he listens, and if I didn't learn anything else I was learning how much I didn't know.
At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.
Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.
The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.
You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.
To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.
I think it's time that we have a women's show about the West. The concentration has been on the men and the Indians.
No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.
Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.
I never figured it was a cowardly thing to be scared. It's to be scared and still face up to what scares you that matters.
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.
One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.
The thieves and killers are goin' to have guns, so if the honest men don't have 'em they just make it easier for the vicious.
A man in his life may have many teachers, some most unexpected. The question lies with the man himself: Will he learn from them?
I'm like a big old hen. I can't cluck too long about the egg I've just laid because I've got 5 more inside me pushing to get out.
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.
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.
There is nothing more dangerous than a woman with a shotgun. Because you don't know when it's going to go off...and neither does she.
Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You went where something might be found and you found something, simple as that.
I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.
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.
I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.
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.
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.
What people speak of as adventure is something nobody in his right mind would seek out, and it becomes romantic only when one is safely at home.
Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.
How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up she's a woman, and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none.
You are your own best teacher. My advice is to question all things. Seek for answers, and when you find what seems to be an answer, question that, too.
Who mentioned the Church? On the contrary, I have great respect for religion. My objection is to those who are against so many things and for so little.
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 yours forever.
Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way.
I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.
... the mind must be prepared for knowledge as one prepares a field for planting, and a discovery made too soon is no better than a discovery not made at all.
Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.
Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain't good for nothin'. I believe what the old Quaker said, 'Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.
When corruption is visited upon the cities of men, the mountains and the deserts await him. The cities are for money but the high-up hills are purely for the soul.
Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth.
Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to pieces. Or love can be a thing that endures, a rich, deep current flowing unending through the years.
Living a life is much like climbing mountains-the summits are always further off than you think, but when a man has a goal, he always feels he's working toward something.
A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.
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.
Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.
I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.
When I die, remember that what you knew of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the man. Remember the father.