Top 100 Edgar Rice Burroughs Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A warrior may change his metal, but not his heart.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

2. “If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

4. “You are here for but an instant, and you mustn’t take yourself too seriously.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

5. “In that little party there was not one who would desert another; yet we were of different countries, different colours, different races, different religions – and one of us was of a different world.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

6. “Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

7. “The time has arrived when patience becomes a crime and mayhem appears garbed in a manner of virtue.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

8. “No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

9. “As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

10. “If I had followed my better judgment always, my life would have been a very dull one.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

11. “Anger and hate against one we love steels our hearts, but contempt or pity leaves us silent and ashamed.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

12. “We are, all of us, creatures of habit, and when the seeeming necessity for schooling ourselves in new ways ceases to exist, we fall naturally and easily into the manner and customs which long usage has implanted ineradicably within us.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

13. “They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

14. “The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious beliefin lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

15. “I shall have to believe even though I cannot understand.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

16. “I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, “Tarzan and the Lost Empire”, there are 31 books on my list.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

17. “I do not think that I am ever overconfident. I am merely wholly confident, and I maintain that there is all the difference in the world there.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

18. “For me, temperance is essential to good work.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

19. “For three days he has pursued me,” she said, “through this horrible world. How I have passed through in safety I cannot guess, nor how I have always managed to outdistance him; yet I have done it, until just as you discovered me.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

20. “The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

21. “Even theories must have foundations.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

22. “Could it be that there were other things more desirable than cold logic and undefiled brain power?”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

23. “I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

24. “I love you, and because I love you I believe in you. But if I did not believe, still should I love. Had you come back for me, and had there been no other way, I would have gone into the jungle with you – forever.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

25. “In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people, they have no lawyers.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

26. “I presume that it is the better part of wisdom that we bow to our fate with as good grace as possible.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

27. “For myself, I always assume that a lion is ferocious, and so I am never caught off my guard.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

28. “It was on the morning of the second day that the first link was forged in what was destined to form a chain of circumstances ending in a life for one then unborn such as has never been paralleled in the history of man.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

29. “Golf is a mental disorder.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

30. “I have ever been prone to seek adventure and to investigate and experiment where wiser men would have left well enough alone.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

31. “Beast?” Jane murmured. “Then God make me a beast; for, man or beast, I am yours.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

32. “Death, only, renders hope futile.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

33. “There was one slight, desperate chance, and that I decided I must take – it was for Dejah Thoris, and no man has lived who would not risk a thousand deaths for such as she.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

Featured in: Romance Quotes

34. “So strong is the power of superstition that even though we know that we have been reverencing a sham, yet still we hesitate to admit the validity of our new-found convictions.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

Featured in: Strong Quotes

35. “When Tarzan killed he more often smiled than scowled, and smiles are the foundation of beauty.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

36. “To Jane the strange apparition of this god-like man was as wine to sick nerves.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

37. “Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

38. “I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

39. “If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

40. “Clothes therefore, must be the insignia of the superiority of man over all other animals, for surely there could be no other reason for wearing the hideous things.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

41. “Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

42. “This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

43. “It is a characteristic of the weak and criminal to attribute to others the misfortunes that are the result of their own wickedness.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

44. “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.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

45. “It never seems to occur to some people, that, like beauty, a sense of humor may sometimes be fatal.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

46. “Her queenly head was poised haughtily upon her smooth red shoulders. Her.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

47. “He killed for food most often, but, being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure, a thing which no other animal does; for it has remained for man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

48. “Yes, your man, Jane Porter. Your savage, primeval man come out of the jungle to claim his mate – the woman who ran away from him,” he added almost fiercely.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

49. “He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea – for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

50. “The one on whom all responsibility rests is apt to endure the most.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs