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.

If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

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.

Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they've missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I've ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one.

Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

A journey is time suspended.

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.

There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.

Evil comes often to a man with money; tyranny comes surely to him without it. I say this, who am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a homeless wanderer upon the earth's far roads. I speak as one who has known hunger and feast, poverty and riches, the glory of the sword and the humility of the defenseless. Hunger inspires no talent, and carried too far, it deadens the faculties and destroys initiative...

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.

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.

Because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king.

Kill him? Would that be it? No man knew better than he the tricks that Destiny plays on a man, or how often the right man dies at the wrong time and place. A man never wore a gun without inviting trouble, he never stepped into a street and began the gunman's walk without the full knowledge that he might be a shade too slow, that some small thing might disturb him just long enough!

So many things that are so dramatic or exciting when you read about them actually happen so simply and quietly. We humans like to consider ourselves important to creation and to the world, and we expect that whenever death comes it should be with a crash of thunder and wild shouts or something, or with soft music around and people looking grave and serious. We always have it that way in the theatre because it makes us believe in our importance. Most of our life is a matter of dressing ourselves up to believe in just that, dressing ourselves in attractive clothes, in titles, in reputations. Actually, at base we all realize that we're just a frightened bundle of animals, still afraid of the unknown, and still afraid of thousands of things that can separate us from life, and trying to shield ourselves from our own smallness.

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.

It has seemed to me that each year one should pause to take stock of himself, to ask: Where am I going? What am I becoming? What do I wish to do and become?Most people whom I encountered were without purpose, people who had given themselves no goal. The first goal need not be the final one, for a sailing ship sails first by one wind, then another. The point is that it is always going somewhere, proceeding toward a final destination.

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.

Folks can’t seem to realize that it isn’t a smooth talker we need in there but a steady man, a man with judgement. Any medicine-show man can spout words, if they are written for him. It takes no genius to sound well. To act right and at the right time is something else again.

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.

The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil, or spirit, might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?

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.

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

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?

It had been my father's way to remove obstructions, to repair washouts in old trails, to leave each trail better than he had found it. "Tread lightly on the paths," he had told me. "Others will come when you have gone."That was how I would remember my father. There was never a place he walked that was not the better for his having passed. For every tree he cut down he planted two.

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.

She had believed the land was her enemy and she struggled against it but you could not make war against a land any more than you could against the sea. One had to learn to live with it to belong to it to fit into its seasons and its ways.

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.

The one law that does not change is that everything changes and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring.

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.

Hate would destroy him who hated.

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.

My future is one I must make myself.

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment heredity and movements and changes in the world about him then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. ... Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today that I shall be tomorrow.

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.

I have been nothing ... but there is tomorrow.

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.