Louis L'Amour Quotes

123 Sourced Quotes

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.

Louis L'Amour
Victory is not won in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later win a little more.

Louis L'Amour
A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.

Louis L'Amour
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
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
A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

Louis L'Amour
Living a life is much like climbing mountains-the summits are always further off than you think, but when a man has a goal, he always feels he's working toward something.

Louis L'Amour
Caution always, but when a man acts he should act suddenly and with decision.

Louis L'Amour
What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.

Louis L'Amour
Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.

Louis L'Amour
To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.

Louis L'Amour
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
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
The Apache don't have a word for love," he said. "Know what they both say at the marriage? The squaw-taking ceremony?" "Tell me." "Varlebena. It means forever. That's all they say.

Louis L'Amour
It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

Louis L'Amour
When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.

Louis L'Amour
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
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
This here's a hard country. If a man ain't fit, he can't last.

Louis L'Amour
There's no stopping a man who knows he's in the right and keeps a-coming.

Louis L'Amour
A man shares his days with hunger, thirst, and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that.

Louis L'Amour
Now, tomorrow Miss Laurie McCrae and me, we have an appointment with a sky pilot who will make it proper for us to travel in double harness.

Louis L'Amour
Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.

Louis L'Amour
When at the typewriter I am no longer where I site but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed.

Louis L'Amour
Violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.

Louis L'Amour
There are shadows for the shadows of things, as a reflection seen in a mirror of a mirror. We know there are circles within circles and dimensions beyond dimension. Reality is itself a shadow, only an appearance accepted by those whose eyes shun what might lie beyond.

Louis L'Amour
A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Louis L'Amour
A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.

Louis L'Amour
But in the West few men would risk bothering a woman. It was the one thing the frontier would not accept.

Louis L'Amour
A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.

Louis L'Amour