Louis L'Amour Quotes

123 Sourced Quotes

Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain't good for nothin'. I believe what the old Quaker said, 'Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.'

Louis L'Amour
A man can learn a lot if he listens, and if I didn't learn anything else I was learning how much I didn't know.

Louis L'Amour
I'm like a big old hen. I can't cluck too much about the egg I've just laid because five more are pushing to come out.

Louis L'Amour
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
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 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
When I die, remember that what you knew of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the man. Remember the father.

Louis L'Amour
Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else."

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
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 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
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
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
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
When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.

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
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
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
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
To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.

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
What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.

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

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