Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

106. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

123. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

129. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

132. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

134. “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

135. “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

136. “Mountains should not be judged by altitude.”

— Louis L'Amour

137. “Evil comes often to a man with money; tyranny comes surely to him without it. I say this, who am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a homeless wanderer upon the earth’s far roads. I speak as one who has known hunger and feast, poverty and riches, the glory of the sword and the humility of the defenseless. Hunger inspires no talent, and carried too far, it deadens the faculties and destroys initiative...”

— Louis L'Amour

138. “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

139. “Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You went where something might be found and you found something, simple as that.”

— Louis L'Amour

140. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

142. “A body shouldn’t heed what might be. He’s got to do with what is.”

— Louis L'Amour

143. “The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.”

— Louis L'Amour

144. “My father had lived through wars and troubles, and it left him with a sense that nothing lasted but what a man made of himself.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

146. “I wonder why it is the man who pleads for mercy never gives it.”

— Louis L'Amour

147. “People have a greater tolerance for evil than for violence. If crooked gamboling, thieving and robing are covered over folks will tolerate it longer than out right violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.”

— Louis L'Amour

148. “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

149. “We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn’t need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.”

— Louis L'Amour

150. “We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.”

— Louis L'Amour