If a man can find dry wood after three days of rain he's a man to ride the river with.

Folks are always talking about how busy a bee is, shows they never really watched a bee.  A bee makes so much fuss with all his perambulating around that folks think they're doing a sight of work, but believe me, I've watched bees by the hour and I can tell you all that buzzing is a big fraud.  The bees I've watched always buzzed in the sunniest places around the best-smelling flowers, just loafing their heads off lusting around in the play of sun and shadow at the swamp's edge.  Busy?  Not so's you could notice.

No... he doesn't understand.  Down here... a man is admired for daring to face another armed man with a pistol and for settling his quarrels bravely.  It isn't a killing that is admired, it is the courage to fight for what you believe.  You won't be admired as the man who killed Cullen Baker, you will be despised as someone who murdered a sleeping man.

No man knew better than he the tricks that Destiny plays on a man, or how often the right man dies at the wrong time and place. A man never wore a gun without inviting trouble, he never stepped into a street and began the gunman's walk without the full knowledge that he might be a shade too slow, that some small thing might disturb him just long enough!

There's more to being a woman than what happens with a man in bed, believe me.  You should learn that.  What you can give a man in bed he can get from any street woman, what he wants from a wife is that, but much more.  He wants tenderness, understanding, the feeling of working together for something.

Swante Taggart had never thought of himself as a brave man.  The very word made him restless and irritable when it came into a conversation, as if men could be divided into the brave and the cowardly, as if brave men were always brave and the cowards always cowardly.  It simply wasn't that way.  A man did what he had to do.

They judge a man out here by his honesty and his courage, and it's right they should.  Most ways a man can go in this country he goes into danger, so you want a man alongside you who has guts.  You don't want to start a wagon across the trails with a coward who'll quit the first time you run into trouble... he'll get you killed.

And if you're doing business out here, a man's word has to be good.  We don't have lawyers and courts to decide, and we don't have a lot of legal nonsense to go through.  If I buy cattle from a man and he tells me he's got ten thousand head, there'd better be ten thousand head... but there will be.  No need to count 'em.

That's why if a man is called a coward or a liar it's a shooting matter.  Nobody wants to associate or do business with either.  Man can't afford to let folks call him either one.