Robert W. Service Quotes

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

Avoid extremes: be moderate In saving and in spending; An equable and easy gait Will win an easy ending.

Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling...let us go

A promise made is a debt unpaid

I remember little of the Yukon or what I wrote there.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

Indulgent Reader, up till now I have concealed it, but I must confess at last. I have one besetting weakness, a weakness that amounts to a vice. I am ashamed of it. Often I have tried to wean myself of it; often cursed the heredity that imposed it on me. Opium? Morphine? Cocaine? Nothing so fashionable. Absinth? Brandy? Gin? Nothing so normal. Alas! let me whisper it in your ear: I am a Chewing Gum Fiend!

Even goats may have starlight in their eyes.

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.

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

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

Give me the scorn of the stars and a peak defiant;
Wail of the pines and a wind with the shout of a giant;
Night and a trail unknown and a heart reliant.

The lonely sunsets flare forlorn Down valleys dreadly desolate; The lonely mountains soar in scorn As still as death, as stern as fate.

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.

I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never heed.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.

And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"Some day," I say, "I will."
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distressed that I
Am such a busy man.

Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,
my Gibbon and Defoe;
To savor Swift I'll never learn,
Montaigne I may not know.
On Bacon I will never sup,
For Shakespeare I've no time;
Because I'm busy making up
These jingly bits of rhyme.

Chekov is caviar to me,
While Stendhal makes me snore;
Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,
And Balzac is a bore.
I have their books, I love their names,
And yet alas! they head,
With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,
My Roster of Unread.

I think it would be very well
If I commit a crime,
And get put in a prison cell
And not allowed to rhyme;
Yet given all these worthy books
According to my need,
I now caress with loving looks,
But never, never read."

(from, Book Lover)

It's easy to fight when everything's right And you're mad with the thrill and the glory; It's easy to cheer when victory's near, And wallow in fields that are gory. It's a different song when everything's wrong, When you're feeling infernally mortal; When it's ten against one, and hope there is none, Buck up, little soldier, and chortle!

She's as light as any fairy; she's as pretty as a peach; She's mistress of the witchcraft to beguile; There's sunshine in her manner, there is music in her speech, And there's concentrated honey in her smile.

I have an intense dislike for artificial society. In France, one could lead a free life - to do what one wanted to do without interference or criticism from one's neighbors.

Our breath is brief, and being so Let's make our heaven here below, And lavish kindness as we go.

I like to think that when I fall,
A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,
This shelf of books along the wall,
Beside my bed, will mourn for me.

Yea, I am one with all I see, With wind and wave, with pine and palm; Their very elements in me Are fused to make me what I am. Through me their common life-stream flows, And when I yield this human breath, In leaf and blossom, bud and rose, Live on I will…. There is no Death

Alas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster;
There's hunger, want, and weariness, yet O we loved it so!
As on we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as, swinging heel and toe,
We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to Anywhere,
The tragic road to Anywhere, such dear, dim years ago.

The following obituary appeared in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of Sept. 16, 1958:

A GREAT POET died last week in Lancieux, France, at the age of 84.

He was not a poet's poet. Fancy-Dan dilletantes will dispute the description "great."

He was a people's poet. To the people he was great. They understood him, and knew that any verse carrying the by-line of Robert W. Service would be a lilting thing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that made the nerves tingle.

And he was no poor, garret-type poet, either. His stuff made money hand over fist. One piece alone, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, rolled up half a million dollars for him. He lived it up well and also gave a great deal to help others.

"The only society I like," he once said, "is that which is rough and tough - and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people."

He found that kind of society in the Yukon gold rush, and he immortalized it.

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

On the ragged edge of the world I'll roam. And the home of the wolf will be my home.

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.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of the truth at last.

Old Year! upon the Stage of Time You stand to bow your last adieu; A moment, and the prompter's chime Will ring the curtain down on you.

Be sure your wisest words are those you do not say.

The man who can fight to heaven's own height is the man who can fight when he's losing.

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.

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.