Top 80 Robert Duvall Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We’re all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth ’til death. We travel between the eternities.”

— Robert Duvall

Featured in: Journey Quotes

2. “Not every successful man is a good father. But every good father is a successful man.”

— Robert Duvall

3. “You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

— Robert Duvall

4. “Never use money to measure wealth, son.”

— Robert Duvall

5. “What drives me is I love my profession. I love to do it.”

— Robert Duvall

6. “There’s no smoking section in heaven.”

— Robert Duvall

7. “The one you fight with the most is always the one who’s most like you.”

— Robert Duvall

8. “I love the smell of juice boxes in the morning.”

— Robert Duvall

Featured in: Good Morning Quotes

9. “I take a vitamin every day; it’s called a steak.”

— Robert Duvall

10. “We either accept weaknesses in good people or we have to tear pages out of the Bible.”

— Robert Duvall

11. “It’s no big thing, but you make big things out of little things sometimes.”

— Robert Duvall

12. “We all have a cradle-to-the-grave journey to make and, in between, what do you do? There’s got to be something hereafter.”

— Robert Duvall

13. “When I knew nothing, I thought I could do anything.”

— Robert Duvall

14. “If you don’t daydream and kind of plan things out in your imagination, you never get there. So you have to start someplace.”

— Robert Duvall

15. “I always figure from the cradle to the grave, we all have our individual journeys, and maybe my journey was a positive one and I accomplished certain things without stepping on too many toes.”

— Robert Duvall

16. “The greatest king of Israel, King David, the author of the Psalms, sent a man out to die in battle so that he could sleep with his wife.”

— Robert Duvall

17. “There’s no right or wrong just truthful or untruthful.”

— Robert Duvall

18. “I like the smell of toast. Coffee is okay, but I don’t drink much coffee. But toast is a nice smell. You smell some toast coming from your kitchen in the morning, you know that you’re involved in a domestic situation and the operation that’s going on is pleasant.”

— Robert Duvall

19. “I’ve always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it’s like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That’s the actor’s craft – using yourself to create a character.”

— Robert Duvall

20. “Cows is one thing. But one man telling another man where he can go in this country is something else.”

— Robert Duvall

21. “The beginning and the end of the tango is the walk.”

— Robert Duvall

22. “You gotta be careful with message movies. People say “What do you want people to take away from it?” I always say its totally individual.”

— Robert Duvall

23. “The only thing that might make me stay in bed would be fear. Once I get rest, then I can overcome the fear of a given day and then I’m ready. I’m ready to go. Not that I always have that fear, but sometimes that’s the only thing that would keep me in bed more than just the laziness.”

— Robert Duvall

24. “I hope I left behind a legacy that people will enjoy. But whatever they want to say, I can’t predict.”

— Robert Duvall

25. “I like to do things that I develop from the ground up.”

— Robert Duvall

26. “The idea is that one’s temperament improves with age; that you learn to deal better with people and become more benevolent and loving. That’s not necessarily true. I try to stay loose but sometimes the best thing to do is get yourself away and take a good nap.”

— Robert Duvall

27. “Too many people think that economics is this subject that should wait until the university level. But it can’t wait that long.”

— Robert Duvall

28. “When you dance tango fast, you have to think slow.”

— Robert Duvall

29. “When you shift the gear and that little needle on the tach goes into the red and reads 9,000 rpm, that’s bad.”

— Robert Duvall

30. “To this day, I still think Lonesome Dove is my best part.”

— Robert Duvall

31. “It’s like kids playing house: ‘You play the father, I’ll play the mother.’ You know, you dress up, you play, they pay, you go home. It’s a game – acting’s a game.”

— Robert Duvall

32. “Sometimes you don’t prepare much. I mean, when I did ‘Lonesome Dove’ way back I rode horses day and night for like three or four months, and that got me ready for that.”

— Robert Duvall

33. “Well, it’s like my movie, ‘The Apostle.’ Some people in the North don’t get that movie. They think that, in the South, if you don’t shout, you can’t play one of those guys.”

— Robert Duvall

34. “I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher!”

— Robert Duvall

35. “What people don’t understand about Sarah Palin is that she is a rancher’s wife. From Alberta down to Texas I’ve known women like that: good common sense, bright and vilified by city people.”

— Robert Duvall

36. “When I’m at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home.”

— Robert Duvall

37. “Being a star is an agent’s dream, not an actor’s.”

— Robert Duvall

38. “A young actor once asked me, What do you do between jobs? I said, Hobbies, hobbies, and more hobbies.”

— Robert Duvall

39. “High Noon is a pretty corny movie.”

— Robert Duvall

40. “You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it’s so rich.”

— Robert Duvall

41. “Spending two years on my uncle’s ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.”

— Robert Duvall

42. “Today, everything has to be made by committee, and has to have special effects, but there’s always room for good films.”

— Robert Duvall

43. “Everybody likes to win.”

— Robert Duvall

44. “Stripping away artifice – it’s the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life – but there’s nothing bigger than life.”

— Robert Duvall

45. “Some people say, ‘Do you have any theories on acting?’ And I say, well maybe: I think you can start with zero and end with zero. You don’t have to go anywhere, you don’t have to go for the result.”

— Robert Duvall

46. “There was nothing wrong with shouting at God.”

— Robert Duvall

47. “One thing I like about Argentina, they only cook with salt; that’s it.”

— Robert Duvall

48. “Very often some of the religious miracle plays you see on television can be very corny, I find. And so simplistic.”

— Robert Duvall

49. “Seeing your name on the list for KP or guard duty when you’re in the Army is like reading a bad review.”

— Robert Duvall

Featured in: Reading Quotes

50. “I wanted to show that crime doesn’t pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment.”

— Robert Duvall