Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

103. “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

104. “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

105. “A journey is time suspended.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

110. “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

111. “The more one learns the more he understands his ignorance. I am simply an ignorant man, trying to lessen his ignorance.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

113. “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

114. “A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he’s never been any place or done anything.”

— Louis L'Amour

115. “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

116. “A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them.”

— Louis L'Amour

117. “There was a curious affinity between man and dog. Both were untamed, both were creatures born and bred to fight, honed and tempered fine by hot winds and long desert stretches, untrusting, dangerous, yet good companions in a hard land.”

— Louis L'Amour

118. “Power not only corrupts he who wields the power but those who submit to it. Those who grovel at the feet of power betray their fellows to hide themselves behind the cloak of submission. It is an evil thing.”

— Louis L'Amour

119. “They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment.”

— Louis L'Amour

120. “The saddle is a place for dreaming when there’s hours of trail ahead...”

— Louis L'Amour

121. “I do not like violence, but ours is a violent time, and there are some men who understand nothing else.”

— Louis L'Amour

122. “Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.”

— Louis L'Amour

123. “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

124. “The dancer becomes the dance. And I am the writing.”

— Louis L'Amour

125. “I never figured it was a cowardly thing to be scared. It’s to be scared and still face up to what scares you that matters.”

— Louis L'Amour

126. “The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.”

— Louis L'Amour

127. “Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.”

— Louis L'Amour

128. “Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long.”

— Louis L'Amour

129. “The fact of the matter is that poor men do not often steal, and when they do, it is petty theft, something to eat or perhaps an item of clothing to keep them from the cold. Thieves are usually those who have something and want more.”

— Louis L'Amour

130. “Who mentioned the Church? On the contrary, I have great respect for religion. My objection is to those who are against so many things and for so little.”

— Louis L'Amour

131. “Being scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighter out of him.”

— Louis L'Amour

132. “Never let them know how you feel or what you are thinking. If they know how you feel they know how to hurt you, and if they hurt you once, they will try again.”

— Louis L'Amour

133. “There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles.”

— Louis L'Amour

134. “No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.”

— Louis L'Amour

135. “Under a quiet sky the planet turned, and horses ate, and men slept, and death waited for morning. –.”

— Louis L'Amour

136. “All men wish to be captains, but few men wish to shoulder the burden of decision, and in coming here with these others, I had staked a claim that I must wall against misfortune.”

— Louis L'Amour

137. “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

138. “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

139. “I’ve a regard for law, although I do not always agree with it. Without law, man becomes a beast.”

— Louis L'Amour

140. “When feeding time comes around, there is nothing a hawk likes better than a nice, fat, peaceful dove.”

— Louis L'Amour

141. “A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.”

— Louis L'Amour

142. “The terrorist lives for terror, not for the change he tells himself he wants. He masks his desire to kill and destroy behind the curtain of a cause. It is destruction he wants, not creation.”

— Louis L'Amour

143. “The buzzards were neutral. No matter who won down there, they would win. They had but to wait.”

— Louis L'Amour

144. “But a long time ago I made me a rule: I let people do what they want to do.”

— Louis L'Amour

145. “Must one seek something? I seek to be seeking, as I learn to be learning. Each book is an adventure as is each day’s horizon.”

— Louis L'Amour

146. “Every morning is a beginning, a fresh start, and a man needn’t be hog-tied to the past. Whatever went before, a man’s life can begin now, today.”

— Louis L'Amour

147. “I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning.”

— Louis L'Amour

148. “There was something her father had said. “We do not own the land, Angie. We hold it in trust for tomorrow. We take our living from it, but we must leave it rich for your son and for his sons and for all of those who shall follow.”

— Louis L'Amour

149. “One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.”

— Louis L'Amour

150. “The buzzard could not reason but he knew the patterns that led to food. His entire life was built upon such fragments of knowledge and he knew that where such groups of men rode, death rode with them.”

— Louis L'Amour