Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

224. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— 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. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

241. “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

242. “It is my privilege. It is so written.”

— Louis L'Amour

243. “Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness.”

— Louis L'Amour

244. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

247. “This is where she lives. Could you live here? You would starve. You would die in the cold. Women like that you leave alone, or speak to politely, very politely.”

— Louis L'Amour

248. “Many a small man is considered good while he remains small, but let power come to him, and he becomes a raging fury.”

— Louis L'Amour

249. “The things a man will wish for are harder to leave behind than all his wants...”

— Louis L'Amour

250. “Where can a man get a bite to eat?” the cowhand asked. “There’s several restaurants, but if you can do with beef an’ eggs, just set down over yonder and we can fix you up. They’re fixin’ breakfast for the boss right now,” the bartender added, “and I’ll just have them put on something extry.” When the bartender saw.”

— Louis L'Amour