We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn’t need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
Courage and bravery are words too often used, too little considered. It is one thing to speak them, another thing to live them.
The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.
I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning.
Life, he decided, was never a question of accumulating material things, nor in the struggle for reputation, but in the widening and deepening of perception, increasing the sensitivity of the faculties, of an awareness of the world in which one lives.
Laws are made to free people, not to bind them.
To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder. Yet I had faith in the intentions of my countrymen, no matter how far they might at times stray from those intentions.
Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You.
It is not enough to do, one must also become.
The blood of good men makes the earth rich.
I’ve written all these stories without any pornography, without any obscenity. I grew up among sailors and miners and lumberjacks and the roughest kind men in the world, but I never found it necessary to use all that in the stories. I can make them real without that. I think much of that kind of writing is a coverup for lack of real skill.
When evil takes up to violence, the good have no choice but to defend themselves.
There are tides in the affairs of men, tides of restlessness and awareness; there are thin threads of thought that reach out across the distance and, like the threads of a weaver, are drawn together tight.
One thing I’d learned over the years: never to waste time moaning about what couldn’t be helped. If a body can do something, fine – he should do it. If he can’t, then there’s no use fussing about it until he can do something.
And as far as trails go, there’s always an open trail for the mind if you keep the doors open and give it a chance.
Men have passed on the knowledge of how to mix cement, lay brick, splice a line, navigate a ship, make steel, and dozens of other crafts, yet in politics, statecraft, and social relationships we continue to repeat old mistakes.
One cannot begin too young nor linger too long with learning.
There is no greater role for a man to play than to assist in the government of a people, nor anyone lower than he who misuses that power.
At another time she had said, “Do not be afraid. A little fear can make one cautious. Too much fear can rob you of initiative. Respect fear, but use it for an incentive, do not let it bind you or tie you down.
You will remember that we won our freedom because we were armed. We were not a simple peasantry unused to weapons. The men who wrote our Constitution knew our people would be safe as long as they were armed.
Keep an open mind,” he told me, “for no man can say what can or cannot be, nor can he say what does or does not exist.