I'm blessed, and I'm just trying to get better every day.
Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.
The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
The one thing. . . that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. . . . Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.
Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.
Until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.
People don't come to Asheville very often, and they don't know I'm there. I enjoy it. I like it.
. . . you shouldn't hate something you don't know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.