Top 50 James Fenimore Cooper Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

2. “Every trail has its end, and every calamity brings its lesson!”

— James Fenimore Cooper

3. “I have passed days thinking of these matters, out in the silent woods, and I have come to the opinion, boy, that as Providence rules all things, no gift is bestowed without some wise and reasonable end.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

4. “Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

5. “I too can play the madman, the fool, the hero; in short, any or everything to rescue her I love.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

6. “If any thing connected with the hardness of the human heart could surprise us, it surely would be the indifference with which men live on, engrossed by their worldly objects, amid the sublime natural phenomena that so eloquently and unceasingly speak to their imaginations, affections, and judgments.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

7. “We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

8. “The sudden falling of the trees are the most dangerous of our accidents in the forest, for they are not to be foreseen, being impelled by no winds, nor any extraneous or visible cause, against which we can guard.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

9. “The deer that goes too often to the lick meets the hunter at last!”

— James Fenimore Cooper

10. “Then he was wrong, Hurry; very wrong. A man can enjoy plunder peaceably nowhere.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

11. “And where, then, is your sweetheart, Deerslayer?” “She’s in the forest, Judith – hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain – in the dew on the open grass – the clouds that float about in the blue heavens – the birds that sing in the woods – the sweet springs where I slake my thirst – and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God’s Providence!”

— James Fenimore Cooper

12. “Is it justice to make evil, and then punish for it?”

— James Fenimore Cooper

13. “Come, friend; you are welcome, though your notions are a little blinded with reading too many books.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

14. “The gifts of our colors may be different, but God has so placed us as to journey in the same path.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

15. “Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers’, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

16. “One, and she was the more juvenile in her appearance, though both were young, permitted glimpses of her dazzling complexion, fair golden hair, and bright blue eyes, to be caught, as she artlessly suffered the morning air to blow aside the green veil which descended low from her beaver.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

17. “Where are the blossoms of those summers!-fallen, one by one: so all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of the spirits.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

18. “But even the falsest of men pay so much homage to truth as to seem its votaries.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

19. “Nothing but vast wisdom and onlimited power should dare sweep men off in multitudes,′ he added; ’for it is only the one that can know the necessity of the judgement; and what is there short of the other, that can replace the creatures of the Lord?”

— James Fenimore Cooper

20. “We live in a world of endless transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

21. “Men are seldom struck by incongruities in their appearance any more than their own conduct.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

22. “Nothing is easier to us who pass our time in the great school of Providence than to l’arn its lessons.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

23. “You are young, and rich, and have friends, and at such an age I know it is hard to die!”

— James Fenimore Cooper

24. “To those who live in the narrow circle of human interests and human feelings, there ever exists, unheeded, almost unnoticed, before their very eyes, the most humbling proofs of their own comparative insignificance in the scale of creation, which, in the midst of their admitted mastery over the earth and all it contains, it would be well for them to consider, if they would obtain just views of what they are and what they were intended to be.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

25. “In short, the magnifying influence of fear began to set at naught the calculations of reason, and to render those who should have remembered their manhood, the slaves of the basest passions.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

26. “Who have we here? some amateur in fights! an inquisitive, wonder- seeking non-combatant, who has volunteered to serve his king, and perhaps draw a picture, or write a book, to serve himself! Pray, sir, in what capacity did you serve in this vessel?”

— James Fenimore Cooper

27. “Now Mr. Green was so completely a star of a confined orbit, that his ideas seldom described a tangent to their ordinary revolutions.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

28. “If mankind conversed only of the things they understood, half the words might be struck out of the dictionaries.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

29. “The turf shall be my fragrant shrine; My temple, Lord! that arch of thine; My censer’s breath the mountain airs, And silent thoughts my only prayers. MOORE.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

30. “Nothing is really patriotic, however, that is not strictly true and just; any more than it is paternal love to undermine the constitution of a child by an indiscriminate indulgence in pernicious diet.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

31. “The physical marvels of the universe produce little more reflection than the profoundest moral truths. A million of eyes shall pass over the firmament, on a cloudless night, and not a hundred minds shall be filled with a proper sense of the power of the dread Being that created all that is there – not a hundred hearts glow with the adoration that such an appeal to the senses and understanding ought naturally to produce.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

32. “If a man believed all that other people choose to say in their own favor, he might get an oversized opinion of them, and an udersized opinion of himself.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

33. “There, ye wise saints, behold your light, your star, Ye would be dupes and victims and ye are. Is it enough? or, must I, while a thrill Lives in your sapient bosoms, cheat you still?” Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

34. “Friend, I am grieved when I find a venator or hunter of your experience and observation, following the current of vulgar error. The animal you describe, is in truth a species of the bos ferus or bos sylvestris, as he has been happily called by the poets, but, though of close affinity it is altogether distinct, from the common Bubulus. Bison is the better word, and I would suggest the necessity of adopting it in the future, when you shall have occasion to allude to the species.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

35. “Hardship! ’tis a pleasure, children, and the greatest that is left me on this side the grave.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

36. “The voice of him, who made the earth, whispereth in the winds; his breath is the movement of nature!”

— James Fenimore Cooper

37. “Mr. Dodge, you have the high consolation of knowing that, throughout this trying occasion, you have conducted yourself in a way no other man of the party could have done.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

38. “His roving eyes began to moisten, and before the hymn was ended, scalding tears rolled out of a fountain that had long seemed dry, and followed each other down those cheeks that had oftener felt the storms of heaven, than any testimonials of weakness.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

39. “When the colony’s laws, or even the King’s laws, run ag’in the laws of God, they get to be onlawful, and ought not to be obeyed.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

40. “But might is right, according to the fashions of the ’arth; and what the strong chooses to do, the weak must call justice. – Natty Bumppo.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

41. “Content is a great fortifier of good looks.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

42. “As your distress is occasioned by my company,” said Eve, “it is fortunately in my power to relieve it.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

43. “The result of this conversation was a sudden determination to produce a work which, if it had no other merit, might present truer pictures of the ocean and ships than any that are to be found in the Pirate.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

44. “The mind is apt to make some efforts to prove the fitness between its qualities and the condition of its owner, though it may often fail, and render that ridiculous which was only hated before.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

45. “A thing which is of no moment itself may be made of importance in the way of competition.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

46. “Men who, in their hearts, really care no more for mankind than See-wise cared for the fish, lift their voices in shouts of a spurious humanity, in order to raise themselves to power, on the shoulders of an excited populace. Bloodshed, domestic violence, impracticable efforts to attain an impossible perfection, and all the evils of a civil conflict are forgotten or blindly attempted, in order to raise themselves in the arms of those they call the people.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

47. “So much the better – so much the better; for I have always found that a conceited man never knows content. All things prove it. Why have we not the wings of the pigeon, the eyes of the eagle, and the legs of the moose, if it had been intended that man should be equal to all his wishes?”

— James Fenimore Cooper

48. “Tis true, the Delawares call me Deerslayer, but it’s not so much because I’m pretty fatal with the venison as because that while I kill so many bucks and does, I’ve never yet taken the life of a fellow-creatur’. They say their traditions do not tell of another who had shed so much blood of animals that had not shed the blood of man.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

49. “One of the misfortunes of a nation, is to hear little besides its own praises.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

50. “Tis an ancient and sacred tie that binds man to his nation; neither can it be severed without infamy.”

— James Fenimore Cooper