Top 160 Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Tact does for life just what lubricating oil does for machinery.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

53. “We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of the ‘woman’s vote’ as one and indivisible.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

54. “It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our every-day duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome; besides, others are apt take us at our own valuation.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

55. “That which is the wonder of one age is the commonplace of the next.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

56. “If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek, five things observe with care: to whom you speak, of whom you speak, and how and when and where. Your loving mother, C. L. Ingalls.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

57. “She thought to herself, “This is now.” She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

58. “It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

59. “Our inability to see things that are right before our eyes, until they are pointed out to us, would be amusing if it were not at times so serious. We are coming, I think, to depend too much on being told and shown and taught, instead of using our own eyes and brains and inventive faculties, which are likely to be just as good as any other person’s.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

60. “Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

61. “God is America’s king.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

62. “Laura knew then that she was not a little girl any more. Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up. Laura was not very big, but she was almost thirteen years old, and no one was there to depend on. Pa and Jack had gone, and Ma needed help to take care of Mary and the little girls, and somehow to get them all safely to the west on a train.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

63. “Then the sun peeped over the edge of the prairie and the whole world glittered. Every tiniest thing glittered rosy toward the sun and pale blue toward the sky, and all along every blade of grass ran rainbow sparkles.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

64. “Anybody knew that no two men were alike. You could measure cloth with a yardstick, or distance by miles, but you could not lump men together and measure them by any rule. Brains and character did not depend on anything but the man himself. Some men did not have the sense at sixty that some had at sixteen.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

65. “Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let’s be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

66. “What is it about water that affects a person? I never see a great river or lake but I think how I would like to see a world made and watch it through all its changes.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

67. “Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

68. “She had not known before that it takes two to make a smile.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

69. “Maybe everything comes out all right, if you keep on trying. Anyway, you have to keep on trying; nothing will come out right if you don’t.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

70. “This country goes three thousand miles west, now. It goes ’way out beyond Kansas, and beyond the Great American Desert, over mountains bigger than these mountains, and down to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America, son. Don’t you ever forget that.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

71. “We go lightheartedly on our way, never thinking that by a careless word or two we may have altered the whole course of human lives, for some person will take our advice and use it.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

72. “Where a light can’t live, I know I can’t.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

73. “Well, Caroline, it’s pleasant to be with a crowd of people all trying to do the right thing, same as we are.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

74. “It was muskets that won the Revolution. And don’t forget it was axes, and plows that made this country.- Father Wilder.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

76. “Success gets to be a habit, like anything else a fellow keeps on doing.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

77. “We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

78. “The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

79. “This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

80. “Then the fire was shining on the hearth, the cold and the dark and the wild beasts were all shut out, and Jack the brindle bulldog and Black Susan the cat lay blinking at the flames in the fireplace. Ma sat in her rocking chair, sewing by the light.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

81. “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

82. “Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

83. “Where’s my little half-pint of sweet cider half drunk up?”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

84. “Almanzo! What’s the matter? Be you sick? It’s five o’clock!”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

85. “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

86. “A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you’re a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

87. “Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

88. “They drove a long way through the snowy woods, till they came to the town of Pepin. Mary and Laura had seen it once before, but it looked different now.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

89. “For winter was coming. The days were shorter, and frost crawled up the window panes at night. Soon the snow would come. Then the log house would be almost buried in snowdrifts, and the lake and the stream would freeze.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

90. “Ma wrote them down with her little red pen that had a mother-of-pearl handle shaped like a feather. When her neat, clear writing filled the paper she turned it and filled it again crosswise. On the other side of the paper she did the same thing so that every inch of paper held all the words that it possibly could.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

91. “Snow as fine and grainy as sugar covered the windows in and sifted off to the floor and did not melt.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

92. “We crossed the James River and in 20 minutes we reached the top of the bluffs on the other side. We all stopped and looked back at the scene and I wished for an artist’s hand or a poet’s brain or for even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was. If I had been the Indians I wold have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Vices are simply overworked virtues...”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

96. “Popcorn is American. Nobody but the Indians ever had popcorn, till after the Pilgrim Fathers came to America. On.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

97. “So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

98. “Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

99. “They were cosy and comfortable in their little house made of logs, with the snow drifted around it and the wind crying because it could not get in by the fire.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

100. “People used to have time to live and enjoy themselves, but there is no time anymore for anything but work, work, work.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder