Bendigo Shafter Quotes

“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. Men do not and cannot and hopefully will never think alike, hence each must yield a little in order to avoid war, to avoid bickering. Men and women meet together and adjust their differences, this is compromise. He who stands unyielding and immovable upon a principle is often a fool, and often bigoted, and usually left standing alone with his principle while other men adjust their differences and go on.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“A forest is a living thing like a human body...each part dependent on all the other parts. A forest needs its birds, its beaver...all its animals and plants. The forest gives shelter to the birds, but they repay the debt with the insects they eat, the droppings they leave, the seeds they carry off to plant elsewhere. The beaver builds dams for himself, but the dams keep water on the land, and although the beaver cut trees to use and to eat, their ponds provide water for the trees during the hot, dry months....Listen, and you can hear the forest breath.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“How many time have I talked with people who have ridden the trails where I have ridden, yet had seen nothing? They passed over the land just to get over it, not to live with it and see it, feel it.

There was beauty out there...”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“Neely grumbled. 'They [Indians] are a murdering lot of savages, and no mention of them in the Bible.'

'What has that to do with it?' John Sampson asked.

'If there's no mention of them,' Neely said, 'they are animals, not men.'

'I don't recall any mention of the English, either,' I said mildly.

He gave me a mean look, then changed the subject.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“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.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“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.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“I never liked the term mystic as applied to someone or a way of thought. It covers something very profound and an awful lot of nonsense passes as profound thought.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“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.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“What we did not possess we had to make for ourselves or learn to do without, but the little I learned helped me to build a defense against the change that time would surely bring, to teach me that to live was to change, and that change was the one irrevocable law. Nothing remained the same.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“We in America always believe we have only to pass a law and everything will be changed, but the truth is nothing is changed. There is only one more law upon the books to be ignored or broken. People only obey a law the majority have already decided to obey, and it must be a very large majority.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“... one thing we know, that all things change. If we leave here ina few years nothing will remain. Our roofs will fall in, timbers will rot, cellars fill with dust, the grass will reclaim the land. We've scarred it, but the scars are trifles, and the earth has been scarred by the fiery hand of God. But always the grass returns, and the trees, and in a few years men will come and look about and they will see nothing, or maybe a few relics that will cause them to wonder.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“... men must always remember, that civilization is a flimsy cloak, and just outside are hunger, thirst, and cold . . . waiting.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“What is it that shapes a man's life? Heredity? Environment? Or is there some unknown element produced by certain times and conditions that will shape a man to meet it?”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“Many look but do not see, for the land about them that seems so changeless is changing even as they watch, a change unbelievably slow yet nevertheless there.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“I trusted these folks, but I didn't want to lead then into temptation, either.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“To build a house is one thing, but to make it a home is quite another, ...”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“My senses were alive to what the wilderness could tell me; it never ceases to send out messages to those who will listen.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“When getting rich became the only incentive, folks didn't care much about a place and left as soon as the chance was gone.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“As long as a man is scrambling in the dust. For food and fuel, looking over his shoulder for enemies, he cannot think of other things.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“When one acts quickly, sometimes one acts too quickly.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“... I wondered if in time man's brain might not become smaller, for as more knowledge was preserved in books or by other means, he might have to think less and contrive less.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“lawman,” he added, “is not a restraint, but a freedom, a liberation. He”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“Of course, we must have a school, but the building is less important than the teacher. It is the teacher who makes the school, no matter how magnificent the building. “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.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“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.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“He taught us that to live in the wilderness one must live with it. Live from it, but allow it to live also. Such was my intention now, and so I explained to Bud Macken my reasons for choosing trees as I did.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“It seems to me that the more money one has the more one worries about little unimportant things.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“men must always remember, that civilization is a flimsy cloak, and just outside are hunger, thirst, and cold…waiting.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“A lawman,” he added, “is not a restraint, but a freedom, a liberation. He restrains only those who would break the laws and provides freedom for the rest of us to work, to laugh, to sing, to play in peace.”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

“distance and found no smoke. We drank our coffee and ate fresh venison killed by Short Bull, and then we straddled our horses and led off to the north. “Yonder’s Black Butte”—Stacy pointed southeast—“and north of it lies Spanish Point, and there’s a trail crosses the Big Horns yonder to the head of Soldier Crick. It’s a fair way…there’s game an’ water.” How many times had I heard that? So it was that men learned of the western lands, even as the Indians such as Uruwishi learned of a country where they had never ridden. Such things were filed away,”
― Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter