Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “You killed Rice Wheeler,” he said, “the Panhandle gunman. “He should have stayed in the Panhandle,” I said.”

— Louis L'Amour

202. “If one has a book, Mr. Boone, One is never alone. They will talk to you when you want to listen, and when you tire of what they are saying, you just close the book. It will be waiting for you when you come back to it.”

— Louis L'Amour

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “In Bowdrie’s limited vocabulary, to be responsible was the most important word.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

209. “If you’re going to have peace rather than violence, both sides have got to want it. One side alone can’t make peace.”

— Louis L'Amour

210. “I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label.”

— Louis L'Amour

211. “There are shadows for the shadows of things, as a reflection seen in a mirror of a mirror. We know there are circles within circles and dimensions beyond dimension. Reality is itself a shadow, only an appearance accepted by those whose eyes shun what might lie beyond.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

213. “There are men who prefer to keep trouble from a woman, but it seems to me that is neither reasonable nor wise. I’ve always respected the thinking of women, and also their ability to face up to trouble when it comes, and it shouldn’t be allowed to come on them unexpected.”

— Louis L'Amour

214. “To my way of thinking there was nothing finer than to top out on a lonely ridge and sit in my saddle with the wind bringing the smell of pines up from the valley below and the sun glinting off the snow of distant peaks. There was an urge to drink from all the hidden springs, catch fish in the lonely creeks, and leave my tracks on all that far, beautiful country.”

— Louis L'Amour

215. “Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy.”

— Louis L'Amour

216. “Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they’ve missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I’ve ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one.”

— Louis L'Amour

217. “My friend, there is a Hell. It’s when a man has a family to support, has his health and is ready to work, and there is no work to do. When he stands with empty hands and sees his children going hungry, his wife without the things to do with. I hope you never have to try it.”

— Louis L'Amour

218. “A man can lose sight of everything else when he’s bent on revenge, and it ain’t worth it.”

— Louis L'Amour

219. “Any time a man comes along and says ‘Indians’ or ‘Mexicans’ or ‘Englishmen’ he’s bound to be wrong. Each man is a person unto himself, and you’ll find good, bad, and indifferent wherever you go.”

— Louis L'Amour

220. “There are folks who can’t abide camp-robber jays, but I take to them. Often enough they’ve been my only company for days at a time, and they surely do get friendly. They’ll steal your grub right from under your nose, but who I am to criticize the lifestyle of a bird? He has his ways, I have mine. Like I say, I take to them.”

— Louis L'Amour

221. “Dogma is invariably wrong, as knowledge is always in a state of transition.”

— Louis L'Amour

222. “For three days, Shandy Gamble had been lying on his back in the Perigord House awaiting the stranger in the black mustache. Nichols, his name was, and if they were ever going to start cattle buying they had better be moving. The season was already late.”

— Louis L'Amour

223. “Shut up!” Joe’s tone was ugly. “If you ain’t willing to try, you can go to hell.”

— Louis L'Amour

224. “It has often been said that we have but one life to live; that is nonsense. If one reads fiction he or she can live a thousand lives, in many parts of the world or in outer space.”

— Louis L'Amour

225. “A man in his life may have many teachers, some most unexpected. The question lies with the man himself: Will he learn from them?”

— Louis L'Amour

226. “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

227. “One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.”

— Louis L'Amour

228. “No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.”

— Louis L'Amour

229. “Revenge could steal a man’s life until there was nothing left but emptiness.”

— Louis L'Amour

230. “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

231. “People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.”

— Louis L'Amour

232. “Laws are made to free people, not to bind them – if they are the proper laws. They tell each of us what he may do without transgressing on the equal liberty of any other man.”

— Louis L'Amour

233. “It is neither size nor age that makes a man, Mr. Ryerson, but something he has inside. My son has it.”

— Louis L'Amour

234. “It was the kind of a country where if you worked with a man and ate his bread, you bought some of his troubles, too.”

— Louis L'Amour

235. “I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.”

— Louis L'Amour

236. “The word was out that Royal Barnes was huntin’ Kilkenny,” somebody commented. “He was kin to the Webers, you know. Half-brother, I think.”

— Louis L'Amour

237. “A man ought to know enough to make a choice; and pa, he always advised me to look to both sides of a proposition.”

— Louis L'Amour

238. “Yet Tanneman was a man grown up to danger and trouble, knowing nothing else, and for the first time he was acting with conscious, deliberate purpose.”

— Louis L'Amour

239. “I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief.”

— Louis L'Amour

240. “What so many of us who abhor violence often forget is that we have peace and civilized lives because there were men and women who went before us who were willing to fight for our freedom to live in peace.”

— Louis L'Amour

241. “Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.”

— Louis L'Amour

242. “I learned then that many a victory is easier won with words than a sword – and the results are better.”

— Louis L'Amour

243. “Navarro lifted a deprecating shoulder and one eyebrow. His eyes had never left the big redhead’s carefully moving hands. The Mexican wore buckskin breeches, hand-tooled boots, and one ivory.”

— Louis L'Amour

244. “Yet moaning and wailing was not my way. I had never complained, for who cares for complaints? If something is wrong, one does something.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

246. “We are a people of the frontier, born to it, bred to it, looking always toward it. And when the frontiers of our own land are gone, when we have drawn them all into an ordered world, then we must seek other frontiers, the frontiers of the mind beyond which men have not gone, the frontiers that lie out beyond the stars, the frontiers that lie within our own selves, that hold us back from what we would do, what we would achieve.”

— Louis L'Amour

247. “I never liked the term mystic as applied to someone or a way of thought. It covers something very profound and an awful lot of nonsense passes as profound thought.”

— Louis L'Amour

248. “We sprung from thin soil, and raised more kin than crops, but we were proud folk...”

— Louis L'Amour

249. “He was realizing how cheap are the principles for which we do not have to fight, how easy it is to establish codes when all the while our freedom to talk had been fought and bled for by others.”

— Louis L'Amour

250. “Such are the amenities of social life, which oft makes a liar of the best of men.”

— Louis L'Amour