Robert W. Service Quotes

A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?-Then you've a hunch was the music meant...hunger and night and the stars.

A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.

I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins --The other kind don't matter.

It's the plugging away that will win you the day So don't be a piker old pard! Just draw on your grit it's so easy to quit- It's the keeping your chin up that's hard.

A promise made is a debt unpaid.

Ah! the clock is always slow it is later than you think.

Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,It's the forests where silence has lease;It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?(You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things–Then listen to the wild–it's calling you.

Of Books and Scribes there are no end:This Plague--and who can doubt it?Dismays me so, I've sadly pennedAnother book about it.

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

The happy man is he who knows his limitations yet bows to no false gods.

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

The Wanderlust has got me... by the belly-aching fire

It's the plugging away that will win you the day So don't be a piker old pard! Just draw on your grit it's so easy to quit- It's the keeping your chin up that's hard.

This is the Law of the Yukon that only the strong shall thrive That surely the weak shall perish and only the fit survive.

There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't sit still;So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest.

No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success; If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.

It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold;The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.