Ride your emotions as the shallop rides the waves; don't get upset among them. There are people who enjoy getting swamped emotionally, just as, incredibly, there are people who enjoy getting drunk.

The real wonder is not that one man should be a genius, but that every man should not be.

Man learned to resort to the dance when he felt helpless or fragmentary, when he felt dislocated in his universe.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas

The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. ... One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to 'try,' but to do.

I am not sure that God always knows who are his great men; he is so very careless of what happens to them while they live.

Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly scrub.