Quotes
Quotes - Burroughs
Yes, I was a fool, but I was in love, and though I was suffering the greatest misery I had ever known I would not have had it otherwise for all the riches of Barsoom. Such is love, and such are lovers wherever love is known.
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: "To rise above the little things."
It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
Serene I told my hands and wait, Nor care for wind or tide nor sea; I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.
A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
Without death and decay, how could life go on?
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice--no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.
The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.
