Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “He is a fool who will descend into a well on another man’s rope.”

— Louis L'Amour

53. “You believe in heroes?” Corvino looked at him thoughtfully. “I cannot believe in anything else. A man needs heroes. He needs to believe in strength, nobility and courage. Otherwise we become sheep to be herded to the slaughterhouse of death. I believe this. I am a soldier. I try to fight for the right cause. Sometimes it is hard to know.”

— Louis L'Amour

54. “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

55. “There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.”

— Louis L'Amour

56. “You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.”

— Louis L'Amour

57. “A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.”

— Louis L'Amour

58. “Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.”

— Louis L'Amour

59. “To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”

— Louis L'Amour

60. “Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.”

— Louis L'Amour

61. “Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way.”

— Louis L'Amour

62. “My lady had the body of a siren, the face of a goddess, and the mind of an Armenian camel dealer.”

— Louis L'Amour

63. “Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.”

— Louis L'Amour

64. “I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.”

— Louis L'Amour

65. “Remember that, son. The dogs bark, but the wagons go on their way, and if you’re going someplace you haven’t time to bother with barking dogs.”

— Louis L'Amour

66. “At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.”

— Louis L'Amour

67. “Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.”

— Louis L'Amour

68. “NO MAN KNOWS the hour of his ending, nor can he choose the place or the manner of his going. To each it is given to die proudly, to die well, and this is, indeed, the final measure of the man.”

— Louis L'Amour

69. “What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life.”

— Louis L'Amour

70. “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

71. “A little rest and meditation often saves a lot of riding over rough country.”

— Louis L'Amour

72. “The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.”

— Louis L'Amour

73. “No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.”

— Louis L'Amour

74. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

76. “No man is lost while he yet lives.”

— Louis L'Amour

77. “It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.”

— Louis L'Amour

78. “Much of command is the ability to take command.”

— Louis L'Amour

79. “He had fought for a principle, and because it was his nature to fight.”

— Louis L'Amour

80. “I was by no means a scholar, simply an interested reader with nothing to do but live and learn.”

— Louis L'Amour

81. “I’ve written all these stories without any pornography, without any obscenity. I grew up among sailors and miners and lumberjacks and the roughest kind men in the world, but I never found it necessary to use all that in the stories. I can make them real without that. I think much of that kind of writing is a coverup for lack of real skill.”

— Louis L'Amour

82. “There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles -famine, disease and such-like -and some folks are born with money, some with none. In the end it is up to the man what he becomes, and none of those other things matters. It is character that counts.”

— Louis L'Amour

83. “There’s a saying that when guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns.”

— Louis L'Amour

84. “He spoke softly to the horse, and its ears twitched. It was funny about a horse – how much they would give for gentleness. There was no animal that responded so readily to good treatment, and no other animal would run itself to death for a man – except, occasionally, a dog.”

— Louis L'Amour

85. “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

86. “A journey is time suspended.”

— Louis L'Amour

87. “No man can put a rope on the past and hope to snub it down. The best thing is to learn to it ride the new trails – Kilkenny.”

— Louis L'Amour

88. “The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

90. “The deep sea can be fathomed, but who knows the heart of a woman?”

— Louis L'Amour

91. “The way I see it, every time a man gets up in the morning he starts his life over. Sure, the bills are there to pay, and the job is there to do, but you don’t have to stay in a pattern. You can always start over, saddle a fresh horse and take another trail.”

— Louis L'Amour

92. “Any man can shoot a gun, and with practice he can draw fast and shoot accurately, but that makes no difference. What counts is how you stand up when somebody is shooting back at you.”

— Louis L'Amour

93. “Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.”

— Louis L'Amour

94. “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

95. “Men strive for peace, but it is their enemies that give them strength, and I think if man no longer had enemies, he would have to invent them, for his strength only grows from struggle.”

— Louis L'Amour

96. “Victory is not won in miles but in inches.”

— Louis L'Amour

97. “Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.”

— Louis L'Amour

98. “A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one’s life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.”

— Louis L'Amour

99. “A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour