If a man can find dry wood after three days of rain he's a man to ride the river with.

Folks are always talking about how busy a bee is, shows they never really watched a bee.  A bee makes so much fuss with all his perambulating around that folks think they're doing a sight of work, but believe me, I've watched bees by the hour and I can tell you all that buzzing is a big fraud.  The bees I've watched always buzzed in the sunniest places around the best-smelling flowers, just loafing their heads off lusting around in the play of sun and shadow at the swamp's edge.  Busy?  Not so's you could notice.

No... he doesn't understand.  Down here... a man is admired for daring to face another armed man with a pistol and for settling his quarrels bravely.  It isn't a killing that is admired, it is the courage to fight for what you believe.  You won't be admired as the man who killed Cullen Baker, you will be despised as someone who murdered a sleeping man.

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!

There's more to being a woman than what happens with a man in bed, believe me.  You should learn that.  What you can give a man in bed he can get from any street woman, what he wants from a wife is that, but much more.  He wants tenderness, understanding, the feeling of working together for something.

Swante Taggart had never thought of himself as a brave man.  The very word made him restless and irritable when it came into a conversation, as if men could be divided into the brave and the cowardly, as if brave men were always brave and the cowards always cowardly.  It simply wasn't that way.  A man did what he had to do.

They judge a man out here by his honesty and his courage, and it's right they should.  Most ways a man can go in this country he goes into danger, so you want a man alongside you who has guts.  You don't want to start a wagon across the trails with a coward who'll quit the first time you run into trouble... he'll get you killed.

And if you're doing business out here, a man's word has to be good.  We don't have lawyers and courts to decide, and we don't have a lot of legal nonsense to go through.  If I buy cattle from a man and he tells me he's got ten thousand head, there'd better be ten thousand head... but there will be.  No need to count 'em.

That's why if a man is called a coward or a liar it's a shooting matter.  Nobody wants to associate or do business with either.  Man can't afford to let folks call him either one.

Many a time when a girl gets herself involved with romance she is so busy being in love she doesn't realize what it can lead to.  They are all in a rosy sort of glow until suddenly they find out the man they love was great to be in love with, but hell to be married to.

We rode swiftly into the growing light, a tight bunch of armed horsemen, grimfaced and bitter with the loss of Aaron Stark and our cattle.  No longer were we simply hard-working, hard-riding men, no longer quiet men intent on our own affairs.  For riding after lawless men was not simply for revenge or recovery of property; it was necessary if there was to be law, and here there was no law except what right-thinking men made for them selves.

In the hills we like our coffee strong but this here would make bobwire grow ona man's chest in the place of hair.

There would be trouble enough, but a man is born to trouble, and it is best to meet it when it comes and not lose sleep until it does.

He fancied himself as a tough man and a gunfighter, but he didn't really want anybody shooting at him.  The trouble with having a reputation as a tough man is that the time always comes when you have to be a tough man.

Suddenly something had happened to me, and it happened to Orrin too.  The world had burst wide open, and where our narrow valleys had been, our hog-backed ridges, our huddled towns and villages, there was now a world without end or limit.  Where our world had been one of a few mountain valleys, it was now as wide as the earth itself, and wider, for where the land ended there was sky, and no end at all to that.

...this is a big country out here and it takes big men to live in it, but it gives every man an equal opportunity.  You're just as big or small as your vision is, and if you've a mind to work and make something of yourself, you can do it.

Sometimes I wonder if anything is ever ended.  The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or the memories of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until they touch lives far from ours.

Politics ain't much different, Tyrel, than one of these iceburgs you hear tell of.  Most of what goes on is beneath the surface.  It doesn't make any difference how good a man is, or how good his ideas are, or even how honest he is unless he can put across a program, and that's politics.

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.

If crooked gambling, thieving, and robbing are covered over, folks will tolerate it longer than outright violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.

Neither one of us had much trust in the peaceful qualities of our fellowmen.  Seems to me most of the folks doing all the talk about peace and giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt were folks setting back to home in cushy chairs with plenty of grub around and the police nearby to protect them.  Back there, men would set down safe of an evening and write about how cruel the poor Indian was being treated out west.  They never come upon the body of a friend who had been staked out on an ant hill or had a fire built on his stomach, nor had they stood off a charge of Indians.

Gold is never a simple thing.  Many a man has wished he had gold, but once he his it he finds trouble.  Gold causes folks to lose their right thinking and their common sense.

A man who expects to sire children doesn't want to appear the fool in front of them.  We Sacketts believed young folk should respect their elders, but their elders had to deserve respsect.

People who live in comfortable, settled towns with law-abiding citizens and a government to protect them, they never think of the men who came first, the ones who went through hell to build something.