reading Bendigo Shafter by Louis L’Amour
“You have an eye for beauty, Mr. Shafter… It is a good thing in a man.” “A big country can breed big men.”
“To destroy is easy, to build is hard. To scoff is also easy, but to go on in the face of scoffing and to do what is right is the way of a man.”
“There is a pleasure in working with the hands and muscles, a pleasure in the use of good tools…”
“Listen and you can hear the forest breathe.”
“When we crossed the Mississippi and rolled out over the grasslands some folks were scared of the size of it all. Miles of grass stretched on all sides, the vast bowl of the sky was overhead…”
“I had become aware that it is not streets and buildings that make a town, but men and women.”
“Remember this, Bendigo, that it is the work a man does that matters. Many men who have made mistakes in their own lives have created grandly, beautifully. It is this by which we measure a man, by what he does in this life, by what he creates to leave behind.”
“A school is wherever a man can learn, Mr. Shafter, do not forget that. A man can learn from these mountains and the trees, he can learn by listening, by seeing, and by hearing the talk of other men and thinking about what they say.”
“Nobody got anywhere in this world by simply being content.”
“Happiness for a man usually means doing something he wants to do very much, something that gives him a sense of achievement.”
“Much as I loved reading I was wary of it, for I soon saw that much that passed for thinking was simply a good memory, and many an educated man was merely repeating what he had learned, not what he had thought out for himself.”
“Hard, bitter, and irritable as he was, he was a man who rose to an emergency. He might not agree with a thing you said or planned to do, but if it demanded strength and courage he would not be left out.”
“There was no yield in him. He was a pusher, a man geared to last stands.”
“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates his fate.”
“What I was to do in the world, this I did not know; yet for all my years there had been within me a vague yearning to be something, to hold a responsible place in the world.”
“A wife and family don’t go along with dreams. They hamper a man’s movements, they restrict the risks he can afford to take to get ahead, and even the most helpful of women is usually more expense than a very young man can bear.” “Fear was ever-present, not only of renegades or Indians, but of man’s age-old enemies, hunger, thirst, and cold.”
“A town means order, and order means law, and without them there can be no civilization, no peace, and no leisure.”
“The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.”
“A change in a man is never so evident to himself.”
“Even as a man shapes a timber for a house or a bridge, he is also shaping himself. He has in himself a material that can be shaped to anything he wishes it to be.”
“When a man has put one bullet into you, and you have been trusted with the care of two children, you do not risk a second bullet.”
“Sometimes the job selects the man.”
“Begin to depend on no one but yourself. The fewer people whom you trust, the fewer on whom you rely, the better for you.”
“Nobody is anybody until they make themselves somebody.”
“She has never been lost, Reverend. She doesn’t need saving.”
“What kind of man was I to be? What sort of thing must I do to become that man?”
“When a body has been taught from boyhood that any stranger is an enemy he isn’t apt to throw that belief away because of a belly full of grub, a warm fire, and a few geegaws given him.”
“I was never much of a drinking man, but drinking men talk together, and I had much to learn about the news of the country.”
“Yet the thing I watched for was movement, for where there was movement there was life, and it might be trouble.”
"There are some things that make me mad, and one of them is a man who bullies other folks."
"People traveling west will not have to consider each ounce of weight. Now they only bring the best, the ones that can be read over and over with profit, so the books you trade for are the good ones. Later the trash will come."
"A mistake is really only a mistake if you persist in it."
"They were empty people, who believed they were the wise ones... To such men death or prison was a kindness, for in the passing of time there came increased bitterness and usually a realization, too late, of the vanished years and the opportunities."
"There can be no living together without understanding, and understanding means compromise. Compromise is not a dirty word, it is the cornerstone of civilization, just as politics is the art of making civilization work."
"The more I’d read and observed the more I realized that the best intentions in the world will get a man just nowhere unless he knows how to get results and can enlist the cooperation of others. And cooperation means compromise."
"I asked no help, used my own team, did the work with my own shovel, my own sweat."
"The world isn’t built around people who do what they want to do, Ben, what they want regardless of who gets hurt. It is built by people who do what they should do."
"On the frontier every boy wishes only to be a man. One is eager to be given responsibility and to be worthy of it. So if you do your job and act the part they accept you as you are. It is the willingness to accept responsibility, I think, that is the measure of a man."
“The problem is simply that we have two peoples face to face with different religious beliefs, different customs, different styles of living. War was a way of life…”
"My friend, there is a Hell. It’s when a man has a family to support, has his health, and is ready to work, and there is no work to do. When he stands with empty hands and sees his children going hungry, his wife without the things to do with. I hope you never have to try it."
"It would be the wind, the rain, the tortured earth, and the looming mountains, it would be drought and hunger, it would be cold and desolation. For it is these elements that decide, and no man can build a wall strong enough to keep them out forever."
“We are a people of the frontier, born to it, bred to it, looking always toward it. And when the frontiers of our own land are gone, when we have drawn them all into an ordered world, then we must seek other frontiers, the frontiers of the mind beyond which men have not gone, the frontiers that lie out beyond the stars, the frontiers that lie within our own selves, that hold us back from what we would do, what we would achieve."