Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different that they need individual training and study. A teacher with a roomful of pupils cannot do this. At home, too, they are in their mothers care. She can keep them from learning immoral things from other children.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Little House books are stories of long ago. The way we live and your schools are much different now, so many changes have made living and learning easier. But 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 to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
I understood....that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
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
We are the heirs of the ages; but the estate is entailed, as large estates frequently are, so that while we inherit the earth, the great round world which is God's footstool, we have only the use of it while we live and must pass it on to those come after us. We hold the property in trust and have no right to injure it or to lessen its value. To do so is dishonest, stealing from our heirs their inheritance.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
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
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
Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
The uplift of a fearless heart will help us over barriers. No one ever overcomes difficulties by going at them in a hesitant, doubtful way.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Things and persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. How unconsciously we judge others by the light that is within ourselves, condemning or approving them by our own conception of right and wrong, honor and dishonor! We show by our judgment just what the light within us is.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
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
There is nothing wrong with God's plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
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
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
If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
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
The object of all education is to make folks fit to live.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
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
A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
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
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. 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
It does not so much matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
There is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
The world seems a lonesome place when mother has passed away and only memories of her are left.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.

Laura Ingalls Wilder