Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Politics is the art of making civilization work.”

— Louis L'Amour

52. “A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.”

— Louis L'Amour

53. “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

54. “My future is one I must make myself.”

— Louis L'Amour

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

58. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

60. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

70. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

77. “To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.”

— Louis L'Amour

78. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

80. “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

81. “Reading without thinking is nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

83. “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

84. “He who plants a tree is a servant of God.”

— Louis L'Amour

85. “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

86. “The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”

— Louis L'Amour

87. “Nobody is ever convinced by argument, anyway. They just think up new reasons for maintaining old positions and become more defensive.”

— Louis L'Amour

88. “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

89. “Courage and bravery are words too often used, too little considered. It is one thing to speak them, another thing to live them.”

— Louis L'Amour

90. “For a man with an education the world is a wide place and the opportunities are many.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

92. “If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

94. “I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

97. “Nobody lives long low-rating an enemy. You’ve got to give the other fellow credit for having as much savvy as you have, and maybe a little more.”

— Louis L'Amour

98. “Most men never discover what they’ve got inside. A man has to face up to trouble before he knows.”

— Louis L'Amour

99. “When evil takes up to violence, the good have no choice but to defend themselves.”

— Louis L'Amour

100. “Treat the earth kindly, my friends, and it will give you comfort, security, and all a man may need. If you plant a flake of gold in the earth, will anything come of it? But plant a seed and it will repay you many times over.”

— Louis L'Amour