Great Throughts Treasury

"There comes a time when it lies within a man's grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, the times, lack of good fortune, or quirks of fate."

"There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles."

"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."

"There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man."

"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."

"This Indian wife you have... - Had. She's dead. - I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up an unhappy memory. - I can't remember anything unhappy about Destarte."

"This here's a hard country. If a man ain't fit, he can't last."

"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."

"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'."

"To a fool time brings only age not wisdom."

"To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder."

"Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen."

"Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline."

"To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could."

"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??"

"We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become."

"Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again."

"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."

"We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different."

"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."

"We'd better give the boys a chance to blow off some steam. They'd better blow it careful, I said. Some of those Canadians are mighty rough. Nice folks, but they can handle themselves."

"What can the will do when the heart commands?"

"We'll find him then and see he's freed, if I have to bring all the Sacketts down from the hills. How many are there? Of the Sacketts, I mean? Nobody rightly knows, but even one Sackett is quite a few."

"What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough."

"What do you wish to be? What would you like to become? I did not know, and I told her so, but the question worried me. Should I know? There is time, she said, but the sooner you know, the sooner you can plan. To have a goal is the important thing, and to work toward it. Then, if you decide you wish to do something different, you will at least have been moving, you will have been going somewhere, you will have been learning."

"When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is."

"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."

"When at the typewriter I am no longer where I sit but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed."

"When I was a small boy I often went to the woods to lie on the grass in the shade. Somehow I had come to believe the earth could give me wisdom, but it did not. Yet I learned a little about animals and learned it is not always brave to make a stand. It is often foolish. There is a time for courage and a time for flight."

"When guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns."

"When you go to a country, you must learn how to say two things: how to ask for food, and to tell a woman that you love her. Of these the second is more important, for if you tell a woman you love her, she will certainly feed you."

"You runnin' scared? she scoffed. First time I ever heard of a Sackett runnin'unless pa was a-shootin' at him."

"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."

"Who the devil are you? Not the devil, Mr. Sardust, but like him, I can open the gates to hell. I'm Mordecai Sackett. You ready to go?"

"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."

"You can't fight the desert... you have to ride with it."

"You ever been to Wyoming? I asked him. Or Montana?"

"Womenfolks have powerful imaginations when it comes to a man, an? she can read things into him he never knew was there, and like as not, they ain?t!"

"You could always tell a boy who'd been tryin' to court one of Jack Ben's girls because he walked kind of straight up an' bent back, and he never set down nowhere. That was because of the rock salt ol' Jack Ben kep' in his shotgun."