Top 100 Louis L'amour Quotes
#1. He had fought for a principle, and because it was his nature to fight.
Louis L'Amour
#2. Can you see the future, Kerbouchard?"
"Who would wish to? Our lives hold a veil between anticipation and horror. Anticipation is the carrot suspended before the jackass to keep him moving forward. Horror is what he would see if he took his eyes off the carrot.
Louis L'Amour
#3. 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
#5. I do not like violence, but ours is a violent time, and there are some men who understand nothing else.
Louis L'Amour
#6. The things a man will wish for are harder to leave behind than all his wants ...
Louis L'Amour
#8. 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
#9. Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.
Louis L'Amour
#10. Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.
Louis L'Amour
#11. 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
#12. One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
Louis L'Amour
#13. But in the West few men would risk bothering a woman. It was the one thing the frontier would not accept - Kilkenny
Louis L'Amour
#14. 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
#15. Because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king.
Louis L'Amour
#16. I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.
Louis L'Amour
#17. My lady had the body of a siren, the face of a goddess, and the mind of an Armenian camel dealer.
Louis L'Amour
#18. There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.
Louis L'Amour
#19. 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
#20. Two well-worn volumes by George Borrow, Lavengro and Romany Rye. The two books are an account of Borrow's time among the Gypsies and what he learned there, and I was delighted.
Louis L'Amour
#21. Man needs so little ... yet he begins wanting so much.
Louis L'Amour
#22. No one can "get" an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.
Louis L'Amour
#23. 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
#24. Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.
Louis L'Amour
#26. I am somebody. I am me. And I don't need anybody to make me somebody.
Louis L'Amour
#27. All men wish to be captains, but few men wish to shoulder the burden of decision, and in coming here with these others, I had staked a claim that I must wall against misfortune.
Louis L'Amour
#28. He had no love for sleeping inside and wanted his horse near him. There was something about lying under the stars that was conducive to thought, and he had some thinking to do.
Louis L'Amour
#29. To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.
Louis L'Amour
#30. If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
Louis L'Amour
#31. There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.
Louis L'Amour
#32. It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.
Louis L'Amour
#33. That was the trouble with California in the 1840's. The life was too easy, there was no necessity for struggle, and men must struggle or they deteriorate.
Louis L'Amour
#34. 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
#35. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'Amour
#36. Stock runnin' on the plains south of the Platte all the way
Louis L'Amour
#37. What a woman she is! Why, she'd make two of me!
Louis L'Amour
#38. Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Louis L'Amour
#39. They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment.
Louis L'Amour
#40. 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
#41. I have education and once I had position. Now I am nobody, but I am happy.
Louis L'Amour
#42. From down the draw, and nobody spoke. All knew that the three
Louis L'Amour
#43. He had seemed huge and fat. He was all of that, but he was also a man of unbelievable strength. His
Louis L'Amour
#44. the way of men. One fights one's battles alone, not asking mercy nor expecting help.
Louis L'Amour
#45. Kept him from going forward. His innate caution
Louis L'Amour
#46. For a man with an education the world is a wide place and the opportunities are many
Louis L'Amour
#47. Yet moaning and wailing was not my way. I had never complained, for who cares for complaints? If something is wrong, one does something.
Louis L'Amour
#48. Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.
Louis L'Amour
#49. It is this by which we measure a man, by what he does with his life, by what he creates to leave behind. - Louis L'Amour
Louis L'Amour
#50. Every morning is a beginning, a fresh start, and a man needn't be hog-tied to the past. Whatever went before, a man's life can begin now, today.
Louis L'Amour
#51. Actors, politicians, and writers-all of us are but creatures of the hour. Long-lasting fame comes to but few.
Louis L'Amour
#52. 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
#53. But even the law cannot be in your bedroom at night.
Louis L'Amour
#54. When corruption is visited upon the cities of men, the mountains and the deserts await him. The cities are for money but the high-up hills are purely for the soul.
Louis L'Amour
#55. It is an old custom of these people to pick up a stone and toss it on the pile. Perhaps it is a symbolical lightening of the load they carry, perhaps a small offering to the gods of the trails.
Louis L'Amour
#56. When guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns.
Louis L'Amour
#57. Nothing is quite so beautiful as when you share it with it with someone else. There is no purpose in working unless one works for someone, for something.
Louis L'Amour
#59. - 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
#60. He might never really do what he said, but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go.
Louis L'Amour
#61. 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
#62. If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.
Louis L'Amour
#63. If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.
Louis L'Amour
#64. The call of the horizon finds quick response in the heart of every wanderer.
Louis L'Amour
#66. My friend, there is a Hell. It's when a man has a family to support, has his health and is ready to work, and there is no work to do. When he stands with empty hands and sees his children going hungry, his wife without the things to do with. I hope you never have to try it.
Louis L'Amour
#67. Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth.
Louis L'Amour
#68. 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
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. [Barnabas speaks] "I will drink water."
"Water? But water is not fit for men to drink. For the cattle, for birds and beast, but a man needs ale ... or wine, if you are a Frenchman." [William answers]
Louis L'Amour
#74. 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
#75. He'd had the foresight to know that a lot of the savages wear store-bought clothes.
Louis L'Amour
#76. The desert preserves. What other lands destroy, the desert keeps. It accepts dead things, holds them close, and draws away the rot that would destroy; given time, it mummifies or crystalizes.
Louis L'Amour
#77. 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
#79. Quit crabbing," Bert said mildly. "We're here now, and we've got to like it.
Louis L'Amour
#80. listen to the advice of others but to act only on my own beliefs, and to make my own decisions.
Louis L'Amour
#81. 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
#82. If at any time your Prince should pretend your position with him is sure, begin from that moment to feel unsure.
Louis L'Amour
#83. What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.
Louis L'Amour
#84. This here's a hard country. If a man ain't fit, he can't last - Kilkenny
Louis L'Amour
#85. A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
Louis L'Amour
#86. This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.
Louis L'Amour
#87. A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
Louis L'Amour
#88. A little rest and meditation often saves a lot of riding over rough country.
Louis L'Amour
#89. When you go to a country, you must learn how to say two things: how to ask for food, and to tell a woman that you love her. Of these the second is more important, for if you tell a woman you love her, she will certainly feed you.
Louis L'Amour
#90. The trouble with being on the wrong side of the law was the kind of company you had to keep.
Louis L'Amour
#91. If you liked Louis L'Amour, you will really love Don Bendell.
Asa Baber
#92. I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.
Louis L'Amour
#93. No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.
Louis L'Amour
#94. 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
#95. Who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.
Louis L'Amour
#96. off the leaves and straightened my clothes, wishing there was
Louis L'Amour
#97. The Bible, of course, for aside from religion there is much to be learned of men and their ways in the Bible. It is also a source of comments made of references and figures of speech. No man could consider himself educated without some knowledge of it.
Louis L'Amour
#98. 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
#99. There will be blood," he said quietly, "blood and death. You should not have come."
"Since when was a woman afraid of blood?" she asked. "The problem is not only Sean's. It is mine also. If there is to be blood, I will share in the letting or the losing of it.
Louis L'Amour
#100. If you're going to have peace rather than violence, both sides have got to want it. One side alone can't make peace.
Louis L'Amour
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top