Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “You killed Rice Wheeler,” he said, “the Panhandle gunman. “He should have stayed in the Panhandle,” I said.”

— Louis L'Amour

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

216. “If you wait for inspiration, you’re not a writer, but a waiter.”

— Louis L'Amour

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

221. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

235. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

241. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

243. “Since I was a small boy, I had watched that forest for enemies or for game, and I knew its every mood and shading, how the sunlight fell through the leaves and where the shadows gathered. It held no mysteries for me but much of memory. I had played there as a child with Yance, Jubal, and Brian, later with Noelle. We had climbed its trees, picked berries there, and played hide-and-seek under its branches.”

— Louis L'Amour

244. “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

245. “Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

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

— Louis L'Amour

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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