Top 100 Louis L'Amour Quotes
#1. If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.
Louis L'Amour
#3. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.
Louis L'Amour
#4. As the days went by, I began to see this girl I had married was even more than I had suspected and in every way.
Louis L'Amour
#5. He realized what a fool he had been. There could be no tolerating of evil. One stamped it out or the evil grew worse.
Louis L'Amour
#6. My lady had the body of a siren, the face of a goddess, and the mind of an Armenian camel dealer.
Louis L'Amour
#7. Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that.
Louis L'Amour
#8. Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.
Louis L'Amour
#9. It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.
Louis L'Amour
#10. When a man lives out his life under the sun and the stars, half the time riding alone over mountains and desert, then he usually has a religion although it may not be the usual variety.
Louis L'Amour
#11. Stock runnin' on the plains south of the Platte all the way
Louis L'Amour
#12. My father had lived through wars and troubles, and it left him with a sense that nothing lasted but what a man made of himself.
Louis L'Amour
#13. I have education and once I had position. Now I am nobody, but I am happy.
Louis L'Amour
#14. It is well for men to risk dangers, for we have broad backs to bear the blows, but I marvel at the courage of women who go with us, and must think of bearing children alone, and in a far place.
Louis L'Amour
#15. When guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns.
Louis L'Amour
#16. - This Indian wife you have ...
- Had. She's dead.
- I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up
an unhappy memory.
- I can't remember anything unhappy
about Destarte.
Louis L'Amour
#17. Yet Tanneman was a man grown up to danger and trouble, knowing nothing else, and for the first time he was acting with conscious, deliberate purpose.
Louis L'Amour
#18. If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.
Louis L'Amour
#19. There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man.
Louis L'Amour
#20. Treat the earth kindly, my friends, and it will give you comfort, security, and all a man may need. If you plant a flake of gold in the earth, will anything come of it? But plant a seed and it will repay you many times over.
Louis L'Amour
#21. What people speak of as adventure is something nobody in his right mind would seek out, and it becomes romantic only when one is safely at home.
Louis L'Amour
#22. Once he paused near a small stream to watch a dipper bob up and down on a rock. He saw a school of trout lurking in a shady place where a branch hung low on the water. No amount of seeing ever made nature old to him, and he was conscious of every movement and sound.
Louis L'Amour
#23. Not even a marshrat will trust itself to one hole only, so always have an escape route, and more than one, if it can be.
Louis L'Amour
#25. We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn't need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
Louis L'Amour
#26. This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.
Louis L'Amour
#27. The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast,
and you miss all you are traveling for.
Louis L'Amour
#28. Who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.
Louis L'Amour
#29. A book is valuable not only for what it says but for what it makes you think, or causes you to remember. No matter what you wish to do or become there are books to teach you, help you, guide you.
Louis L'Amour
#30. The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.
Louis L'Amour
#31. Bayly, to say that he died down in the Guadaloupes ... of
Louis L'Amour
#32. The clouds hung like dark, blowing tapestries in the gaps of the hills.
Louis L'Amour
#33. Yol Bolsun" (May there be a road) [Louis L'Amour}
Louis L'Amour
#34. If they didn't accept him, the hell with them - he could go his own way.
Louis L'Amour
#35. She'd never been one to think in terms of years, anyway. A person was what they were, and many a man at forty was sixty in his ways and many another was twenty and would never grow past it.
Louis L'Amour
#36. The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
Louis L'Amour
#37. Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.
Louis L'Amour
#38. I fear there will be no future for those who do not change.
Louis L'Amour
#39. From The Skull and the Arrow:
The man went on until he saw the dark opening of a cave. He turned to it for shelter then, as men have always done. Though there are tents and wickiups, halls and palaces, in his direst need man always returns to the cave.
Louis L'Amour
#40. From a blow. His yellow eyes clung to von Hallstatt. He desperately
Louis L'Amour
#41. The saddle is a place for dreaming when there's hours of trail ahead ...
Louis L'Amour
#42. The cause of right is never lost, Leal. I've often thought the biggest damned fool in the world could to down in history as a great man if he would just consistently vote for the greatest good of the greatest number - Kilkenny
Louis L'Amour
#43. I've noticed...that whenever a man is asked to be realistic he is being asked to betray something in which he believes. It is the favorite argument of those who believe that only the end matters, not the means.
Louis L'Amour
#45. A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.
Louis L'Amour
#46. He is a fool who will descend into a well on another man's rope.
Louis L'Amour
#47. The Indian must not lose pride in what he does, in his handicraft, for if he loses pride he will no longer build, his art will fail him, and he will completely be dependent upon others.
Louis L'Amour
#48. Women! He thought, who could ever figure them out? No matter what a man said, he was always in the wrong. There was no logic in them.
Louis L'Amour
#49. A man can lose sight of everything else when he's bent on revenge, and it ain't worth it.
Louis L'Amour
#50. The terrorist lives for terror, not for the change he tells himself he wants. He masks his desire to kill and destroy behind the curtain of a cause. It is destruction he wants, not creation.
Louis L'Amour
#51. Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You went where something might be found and you found something, simple as that.
Louis L'Amour
#52. Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.
Louis L'Amour
#54. The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.
Louis L'Amour
#55. Revenge could steal a man's life until there was nothing left but emptiness.
Louis L'Amour
#56. I have reverence for truth, but I do not know what truth is. I suspect there are many truths, and therefore, I suspect all who claim to have the truth.
Louis L'Amour
#57. I learned then that many a victory is easier won with words than a sword - and the results are better.
Louis L'Amour
#58. To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.
Louis L'Amour
#59. Such are the amenities of social life, which oft makes a liar of the best of men.
Louis L'Amour
#60. I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller,
the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered-
as a storyteller. A good storyteller.
Louis L'Amour
#61. I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals ... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.
Louis L'Amour
#63. See perhaps four and a half miles, and the lookout
Louis L'Amour
#64. People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.
Louis L'Amour
#65. Staring out at the sunlit street. It was a whole lot simpler out
Louis L'Amour
#66. Shut up!" Joe's tone was ugly. "If you ain't willing to try, you can go to hell.
Louis L'Amour
#67. It didn't seem fair, but then, a lot of things aren't. We take them as they come.
Louis L'Amour
#68. Personally, I do not believe the human mind has any limits but those we impose ourselves.
Louis L'Amour
#70. I was raised up where folks looked to the hills, only up where we came from you hadn't chance to look much higher, we were that near the top of the ridge.
Louis L'Amour
#72. I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.
Louis L'Amour
#73. It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.
Louis L'Amour
#74. vantage point on the ridge he could see a green, forested valley where
Louis L'Amour
#76. Adventure is nothing but a romantic name for trouble.
Louis L'Amour
#77. At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.
Louis L'Amour
#78. A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything.
Louis L'Amour
#79. No man can put a rope on the past and hope to snub it down. The best thing is to learn to it ride the new trails - Kilkenny
Louis L'Amour
#80. It is not enough to do, one must also become. I wish to be wiser, stronger, better. This
" I held out my hands "
this thing that is me is incomplete. It is only the raw material with which I have to work. I want to make it better than I received it.
Louis L'Amour
#81. A quiet man I was, and not one to provoke a quarrel, but if set upon I would fight back. I do not say this in boasting, for it was as much a part of me as the beating of my heart. It was bred in the blood-line of those from whom I come, and I could not be other than I am.
Louis L'Amour
#82. It is a living. It is enough. I am free. The nights are long and quiet, the mornings cool and bright, I live with the sun, the moon, and the stars. The air is fresh where I am, and there is no one to hurry me or to demand this or that of me.
Louis L'Amour
#83. My folks built blood into the foundations of this country and I don't aim to see them torn down for no reason whatsoever.
Louis L'Amour
#84. Womenfolks have powerful imaginations when it comes to a man, an' she can read things into him he never knew was there, and like as not, they ain't!
Louis L'Amour
#85. We were young then, and the West was young, with the land broad and bright before us. We knew, whatever the truth was, that every horse could be ridden, every man whipped, every girl loved.
Louis L'Amour
#86. There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.
Louis L'Amour
#87. Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.
Louis L'Amour
#88. Caution always, but when a man acts he should act suddenly and with decision.
Louis L'Amour
#89. Nobody lives long low-rating an enemy. You've got to give the other fellow credit for having as much savvy as you have, and maybe a little more.
Louis L'Amour
#90. Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way.
Louis L'Amour
#91. To pursue a man effectively, it is best to begin with his thinking.
Louis L'Amour
#92. You stick with him, no matter what. It's all he'll ever have, what you can give him.
Louis L'Amour
#94. The point is," Frank said, "that we're here. No use talking about what should have been.
Louis L'Amour
#95. A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.
Louis L'Amour
#96. Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.
Louis L'Amour
#97. A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them.
Louis L'Amour
#99. Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
Louis L'Amour
#100. The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.
Louis L'Amour
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