The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.

The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

There's only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the disappoint­ment s.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape.

In the country Sunday is the day on which you do exactly as much work as you do on other days but feel guilty all the time you are doing it because Sunday is a day of rest.

Will is developed in meditation. It is refined. It is within you, but you don't know how to get to it.

However un-Christian this may sound, I am not even predisposed against myself.

I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits.

There is not a moment without some duty.

My job is to defeat the guy in front of me, do it until he quits, and then wait for them to send in the next guy.

The best musicians are not the best players, they're the best listeners.

He who advises a sick man, whose manner of life is prejudicial to health, is clearly bound first of all to change his patient's manner of life.

I've always had that knack for staying pretty even keel and the more the situation gets tense the more I see things clearly and I think that's just a knack that I've always had.