Top 100 Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes
#1. Money hasn't any value of its own; it represents the stored up energy of men and women and is really just someone's promise to pay a certain amount of that energy.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#2. I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#3. This year the teacher was a slim, pale young man. His name was Mr. Corse. He was gentle and patient, and never whipped little boys because they forgot how to spell a word. Almanzo
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#5. I dare you to ask him," Frank said. The other boys were listening. Almanzo put his hands in his pockets and said: "I'd just as lief ask him if I wanted to." "Yah, you're scared!" Frank jeered. "Double dare! Double dare!
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#6. Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#7. Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#9. We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#10. The candle-light was dim, as though the darkness were trying to put it out.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#11. I understood ... that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#15. They drove a long way through the snowy woods, till they came to the town of Pepin. Mary and Laura had seen it once before, but it looked different now.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#16. Nothing anywhere could be better than being at home with the home folks, she was sure.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#17. There is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#19. Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#20. All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it ... bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#21. But in the east the sky was pale and through the gray woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing Grandpa and Grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#23. They were cosy and comfortable in their little house made of logs, with the snow drifted around it and the wind crying because it could not get in by the fire.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#24. When a man undertakes a job, he has to stick to it till he finishes it. If
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#25. As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#26. There is nothing wrong with God's plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#27. Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#28. Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#29. Well, Caroline, it's pleasant to be with a crowd of people all trying to do the right thing, same as we are.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#30. Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#32. Then the fire was shining on the hearth, the cold and the dark and the wild beasts were all shut out, and Jack the brindle bulldog and Black Susan the cat lay blinking at the flames in the fireplace. Ma sat in her rocking chair, sewing by the light
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#33. People used to have time to live and enjoy themselves, but there is no time anymore for anything but work, work, work.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#34. We go lightheartedly on our way, never thinking that by a careless word or two we may have altered the whole course of human lives, for some person will take our advice and use it.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#35. Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary's eyes, and Mary was blind.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#36. butter in a golden lump, drowning in the buttermilk. Then Ma took out the lump with a wooden paddle, into a wooden bowl, and she washed it many times in cold water, turning it over and over and working it with the paddle until the water ran clear. After that she salted it. Now
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#38. It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our every-day duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome; besides, others are apt take us at our own valuation.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#39. It is the simple things of life that make living worthwhile, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest, and living close to nature.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#40. The snug log house looked just as it always had. It did not seem to know they were going away.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#41. There was no time to lose, no time to waste in rest or play. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#42. Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#43. Life was not intended to be simply a round of work, no matter how interesting and important that work may be. A moment's pause to watch the glory of a sunrise or a sunset is soul-satisfying, while a bird's song will set the steps to music all day long.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#44. The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#45. In the bitter cold weather Pa could not be sure of finding any wild game to shoot for meat. The
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#46. The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#48. In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#49. The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#50. The path that went by the little house had become a road. Almost every day Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking by on that road.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#51. If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#52. It does not so much matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#53. This earthly life is a battle,' said Ma. 'If it isn't one thing to contend with, it's another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#54. God hates a coward."
I don't actually believe this is true. But it's something to aim for.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#55. We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#56. I believe we would be happier to have a personal revolution in our individual lives and go back to simpler living and more direct thinking.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#57. We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#58. You venture into the unknown land because that is where your heart will take you. In the end, it is not what you want to do, it is something you have to do.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#59. Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#60. A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#61. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime. All the wild seeds of weed and thistle, the sprouts of vine and bush and tree, are trying to take the fields. Farmers must fight them with harrow and plow and hoe; they must plant the good seeds quickly.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#63. Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#65. So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#66. No one has ever achieved anything from the smallest to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#67. Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone, Charles." But Pa answered, cheerfully: "What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#68. A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#70. The days have never been long enough to do the things I would like to do. Every year has held more of interest than the year before.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#71. She heard pa shouting,Jiminy crickets!It's raining fish-hooks and hammer handles!
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#72. Politicians, they take pleasure a-prying into a man's affairs and I aimed to please 'em.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#73. He would butcher it as soon as the weather was cold enough to keep the pork frozen. Once
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#74. Snow as fine and grainy as sugar covered the windows in and sifted off to the floor and did not melt.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#75. Courage and kindness, loyalty, truth, and helpfulness are always the same and always needed.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#77. I declare to goodness, I don't know but sometimes I believe in women's rights. If women were voting and making laws, I believe they'd have better sense. (Mrs. McKee to Laura, regarding homesteading laws)
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#79. When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door ... The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#80. It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#81. The world seems a lonesome place when mother has passed away and only memories of her are left.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#82. The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#85. The fact is that while there has been a good deal of discussion for and against women in business, farm women have always been business women, and I have never heard a protest.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#86. The barrels of salted fish were in the pantry, and yellow cheeses were stacked on the pantry shelves. Then
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#87. These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves
they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#88. Then Father said: If the teacher has to thrash you again, Royal, I'll give you a thrashing you'll remember.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89. Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#90. That machine's a great invention!" he said. "Other folks can stick to old-fashioned ways if they want to, but I'm all for progress. It's a great age we're living in. As long as I raise wheat, I'm going to have a machine come and thresh it, if there's one anywhere in the neighborhood.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#91. There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#92. You could buy a suckling pig with it, if you want to. You could raise it, and it would raise a litter of pigs, worth four, five dollars apiece. Or you can trade that half-dollar for lemonade, and drink it up. You do as you want, it's your money.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#93. [On dishonesty:] If there were a cry of 'stop thief!' we would all stand still.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#94. Suffering passes, while love is eternal. That's a gift that you have received from God. Don't waste it.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#95. So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#96. Mothers always fuss about the way you eat. You can hardly eat any way that pleases them.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#97. It was muskets that won the Revolution. And don't forget it was axes, and plows that made this country.- Father Wilder
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#98. He knew you could never teach an animal anything if you struck it, or even shouted at it angrily. He must always be gentle, and quiet, and patient, even when they made mistakes. Star
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#99. Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#100. Laura said faintly, 'I thought God takes care of us.'
'He does,' Pa said, 'so far as we do what's right. And He gives us a conscience and brains to know what's right. But He leaves it to us to do as we please. That's the difference between us and everything else in creation.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
