Book: Smoke Bellew

I smelled meat, and it is to my taste. I am moving on.
I've got my taste of meat, and I like it. I'm going on.

People are not defeated until defeat.
A man was not beaten until he was beaten.

The system is statistics. If the system is correct, never lose. But happiness can always cheat.
A system is statistical. When you get the right system you can't lose, and that's the difference between it and a hunch. You never know when the right hunch is going wrong.

Who plays the system, he always loses. When the system, there is no happiness.
Systems is sure losers. They ain't no hunches in systems.

I realized that the quest for gold is, in essence, a sporting event.
It strikes me that stampeding is at best a sporting proposition.

He recalled the famous words of one of the mad philosopher on the soul. And indeed, at this moment he was much more important to overtake the Baby than to find a fortune. He came to the conclusion that the game is the important thing, not winning. All the forces of his soul, his mind, his Brawn was sent only to defeat this man, who in all his life did not read a single book and could not distinguish screech hurdy-gurdy from Opera arias.
Through his brain was running a phrase of the mad philosopher - "the transvaluation of values". In truth, he was less interested in staking a fortune than in beating Shorty. After all, he concluded, it wasn't the reward of the game but the playing of it that counted. Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain.

Like the Argonauts of old,
After leaving his native home,
Swim, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum,
For The Golden Fleece.
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.

There are moments of fatigue, when people forget what they were taught civilization.
It is in moments of exhaustion that men lose all their reserves of civilization.

Does not make sense to go back when I get that far.
What's the good of turning back after getting this far?

Others can. And so can we.
What other men can do, we can do.

Man is a product of the environment.
Men are the products of their environment.