He is a fool who will descend into a well on another man’s rope.
A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.
It is this by which we measure a man, by what he does with his life, by what he creates to leave behind. – Louis L’Amour.
To survive? What is that? A mouse lives, a fly lives; one flees in terror, another lives in filth. They exist, they are, but do they live?
I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.
Every morning is a beginning, a fresh start, and a man needn’t be hog-tied to the past. Whatever went before, a man’s life can begin now, today.
A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them.
Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Nobody is ever convinced by argument, anyway. They just think up new reasons for maintaining old positions and become more defensive.
Most men never discover what they’ve got inside. A man has to face up to trouble before he knows.
Avoid conflict and trouble, for enough of it fetches to a man without his asking.
The Bible, of course, for aside from religion there is much to be learned of men and their ways in the Bible. It is also a source of comments made of references and figures of speech. No man could consider himself educated without some knowledge of it.
Nobody lives long low-rating an enemy. You’ve got to give the other fellow credit for having as much savvy as you have, and maybe a little more.
There was a curious affinity between man and dog. Both were untamed, both were creatures born and bred to fight, honed and tempered fine by hot winds and long desert stretches, untrusting, dangerous, yet good companions in a hard land.
This is where she lives. Could you live here? You would starve. You would die in the cold. Women like that you leave alone, or speak to politely, very politely.
No one can “get” an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process. If it does nothing else, it should provide students with the tools for learning, acquaint them with methods of study and research, methods of pursuing an idea. We can only hope they come upon an idea they wish to pursue.
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...
There’s a saying that when guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns.
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.
And then there’s the gun itself. No man in his right mind will play with a gun. I’ve seen show-offs doing fancy spins and all that. No real gun-fighter ever did. With a hair-trigger, he’d be likely to blow a hole in his belly. The gun-fighter knows enough of guns to be wary of them. He treats them with respect. A pistol was never made for anything except killing, and a gunfighter never draws a gun unless to shoot, and he shoots to kill.