Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Mountains should not be judged by altitude.”

— Louis L'Amour

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.”

— Louis L'Amour

160. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

162. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

165. “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

166. “But even the law cannot be in your bedroom at night.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

168. “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

169. “It is an old custom of these people to pick up a stone and toss it on the pile. Perhaps it is a symbolical lightening of the load they carry, perhaps a small offering to the gods of the trails.”

— Louis L'Amour

170. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

174. “A quiet man I was, and not one to provoke a quarrel, but if set upon I would fight back. I do not say this in boasting, for it was as much a part of me as the beating of my heart. It was bred in the blood-line of those from whom I come, and I could not be other than I am.”

— Louis L'Amour

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “Hate would destroy him who hated.”

— Louis L'Amour

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

195. “He had no love for sleeping inside and wanted his horse near him. There was something about lying under the stars that was conducive to thought, and he had some thinking to do.”

— Louis L'Amour

196. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

198. “I would not have the old ways die, for all people in their own way find a path to wisdom. Each way can be a good way. Each has something to offer the world.”

— Louis L'Amour

199. “A name is what a man makes it,” I.”

— Louis L'Amour

200. “The Bible, of course, for aside from religion there is much to be learned of men and their ways in the Bible. It is also a source of comments made of references and figures of speech. No man could consider himself educated without some knowledge of it.”

— Louis L'Amour