Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 7

151. “I’m like a big old hen. I can’t cluck too long about the egg I’ve just laid because I’ve got 5 more inside me pushing to get out.”

— Louis L'Amour

152. “When a man picks up a gun he picks up responsibility. He has a dangerous weapon, and he’d better have coolness and discretion... He’d better have judgment. That other man who wears a gun also has a family, a home, he has hopes, dreams, ambitions. If you’re human, you must think of that. Nobody in his right mind takes a human life lightly.”

— Louis L'Amour

153. “It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.”

— Louis L'Amour

154. “How lonely were these silent hills! How reaching out for the sounds of men, for I believe a land needs people to nurse its flesh and bring from it the goodness of crops.”

— Louis L'Amour

155. “Hate would destroy him who hated.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

157. “The desert preserves. What other lands destroy, the desert keeps. It accepts dead things, holds them close, and draws away the rot that would destroy; given time, it mummifies or crystalizes.”

— Louis L'Amour

158. “Avoid conflict and trouble, for enough of it fetches to a man without his asking.”

— Louis L'Amour

159. “You can make laws against weapons but they will be observed only by those who don’t intend to use them anyway. The lawless can always smuggle or steal or even make a gun. By refusing to wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity.”

— Louis L'Amour

160. “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

161. “It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, ‘He was a man who didn’t believe in violence, He’s a good man... and dead.”

— Louis L'Amour

162. “A man often creates an image of a girl in his mind but when it comes right down to it that’s the only place the girl exists.”

— Louis L'Amour

163. “The trees are aware, and the bushes. The birds and small animals are aware, and they listen, hesitant, suspecting. Awareness of danger is an element of their being. It is like their breathing, like the blood in their veins, and one who lives much with the wilderness become so aware, too... Half of woodcraft is attention, and all of survival.”

— Louis L'Amour

164. “After a few days, I mused, I would have no trouble. Whoever heard of a revolution of fat men?”

— Louis L'Amour

165. “Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.”

— Louis L'Amour

166. “Actors, politicians, and writers-all of us are but creatures of the hour. Long-lasting fame comes to but few.”

— Louis L'Amour

167. “What can the will do when the heart commands?”

— Louis L'Amour

168. “Folks can’t seem to realize that it isn’t a smooth talker we need in there but a steady man, a man with judgement. Any medicine-show man can spout words, if they are written for him. It takes no genius to sound well. To act right and at the right time is something else again.”

— Louis L'Amour

169. “We were young then, and the West was young, with the land broad and bright before us. We knew, whatever the truth was, that every horse could be ridden, every man whipped, every girl loved.”

— Louis L'Amour

170. “How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up she’s a woman, and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

172. “Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.”

— Louis L'Amour

173. “The mind gathers its grain in all fields, storing it against a time of need, then suddenly it bursts into awareness, which men call inspiration or second sight or a gift.”

— Louis L'Amour

174. “To pursue a man effectively, it is best to begin with his thinking.”

— Louis L'Amour

175. “Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic.”

— Louis L'Amour

176. “I’ve noticed... that whenever a man is asked to be realistic he is being asked to betray something in which he believes. It is the favorite argument of those who believe that only the end matters, not the means.”

— Louis L'Amour

177. “No one can “get” an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process. If it does nothing else, it should provide students with the tools for learning, acquaint them with methods of study and research, methods of pursuing an idea. We can only hope they come upon an idea they wish to pursue.”

— Louis L'Amour

178. “I was raised up where folks looked to the hills, only up where we came from you hadn’t chance to look much higher, we were that near the top of the ridge.”

— Louis L'Amour

179. “Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.”

— Louis L'Amour

180. “This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.”

— Louis L'Amour

181. “All that was speculation, and a man can get carried away by a reasonable theory. Often a man finds a theory that explains things and he builds atop that theory, finding all the right answers... only the basic theory is wrong. But that’s the last thing he will want to admit.”

— Louis L'Amour

182. “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

183. “Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth.”

— Louis L'Amour

184. “Because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king.”

— Louis L'Amour

185. “If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it’s a ‘historical novel.’ If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it’s a ‘Western’- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

187. “Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it’s hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.”

— Louis L'Amour

188. “I fear there will be no future for those who do not change.”

— Louis L'Amour

189. “Women! He thought, who could ever figure them out? No matter what a man said, he was always in the wrong. There was no logic in them.”

— Louis L'Amour

190. “Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.”

— Louis L'Amour

191. “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

192. “It is a living. It is enough. I am free. The nights are long and quiet, the mornings cool and bright, I live with the sun, the moon, and the stars. The air is fresh where I am, and there is no one to hurry me or to demand this or that of me.”

— Louis L'Amour

193. “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

194. “If you want to be creative, go where your questions lead you.”

— Louis L'Amour

195. “What is today accepted as truth will tomorrow prove to be only amusing.”

— Louis L'Amour

196. “If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.”

— Louis L'Amour

197. “And then there’s the gun itself. No man in his right mind will play with a gun. I’ve seen show-offs doing fancy spins and all that. No real gun-fighter ever did. With a hair-trigger, he’d be likely to blow a hole in his belly. The gun-fighter knows enough of guns to be wary of them. He treats them with respect. A pistol was never made for anything except killing, and a gunfighter never draws a gun unless to shoot, and he shoots to kill.”

— Louis L'Amour

198. “Some folks want the lights of cities, the admiration of women, and the fame that comes with success. Me, I just want the trail unwinding ahead of me, the view from the top of the ridge, and the smell of a wood-smoke fire.”

— Louis L'Amour

199. “I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.”

— Louis L'Amour

200. “As the days went by, I began to see this girl I had married was even more than I had suspected and in every way.”

— Louis L'Amour