Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “This was a big country needing big men and women to live in it, and there was no place out here for the frightened or the mean.”

— Louis L'Amour

252. “It was a sea of horns above the red, brown, brindle, and white-splashed backs of the steers.”

— Louis L'Amour

253. “Ma’am,” I said, “I’d have liked it, having you for a ma.”

— Louis L'Amour

254. “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

255. “If they didn’t accept him, the hell with them – he could go his own way.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

257. “To survive? What is that? A mouse lives, a fly lives; one flees in terror, another lives in filth. They exist, they are, but do they live?”

— Louis L'Amour

258. “The trouble with being on the wrong side of the law was the kind of company you had to keep.”

— Louis L'Amour

259. “The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.”

— Louis L'Amour

260. “I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.”

— Louis L'Amour

261. “She’d never been one to think in terms of years, anyway. A person was what they were, and many a man at forty was sixty in his ways and many another was twenty and would never grow past it.”

— Louis L'Amour

262. “There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.”

— Louis L'Amour

263. “The savage is never far from the surface in any of us, but because we know he is there we fight it down.”

— Louis L'Amour

264. “Well, I’ve often been wrong, but this time I was right and they had to pay mind to me or bury me, and mine is a breed that dies hard.”

— Louis L'Amour

265. “I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning.”

— Louis L'Amour

266. “When the raw, harsh liquor had cut the dust from his throat he looked up at a nearby.”

— Louis L'Amour

267. “In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.”

— Louis L'Amour

268. “Need and desire have no connection,′ I said. ‘Many people desire things they do not need. Happiness can be measured by what one does not need, but often to see is to want.”

— Louis L'Amour

269. “No man is a complete ruler or dictator. He is only the mouthpiece for the wishes of his followers. As long as he expresses those wishes, he leads them.”

— Louis L'Amour

270. “The point is,” Frank said, “that we’re here. No use talking about what should have been.”

— Louis L'Amour

271. “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

272. “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

273. “It means little to anybody but us. We set store by kinfolk. We’ve our troubles from time to time, but when one of us is in danger, there’ll be help from any who are around.”

— Louis L'Amour

274. “For it is given that no man can do it all, that each must carry the future forward a few years and then pass the message on to him who follows.”

— Louis L'Amour

275. “If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?”

— Louis L'Amour

276. “He was still a boy, but there was steel in him. The eyes into which she looked now were cool, but they were eyes strangely mature. “I reckon I’ll stay, ma’am. Down where I come from, we don’t back water for no man.”

— Louis L'Amour

277. “No telling what those men wanted... but in these times there were white men with bloodier hands than any Indian...”

— Louis L'Amour

278. “Not that folks disliked me or that I ever went around being mean, but folks never did get close to me and it was most likely my fault. There was always something standoffish about me. I liked folks, but I liked the wild animals, the lonely trails, and the mountains better.”

— Louis L'Amour

279. “The clouds hung like dark, blowing tapestries in the gaps of the hills.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

281. “A man marries by accident, a woman by design.”

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

283. “Nobody lives long low-rating an enemy. You’ve got to give the other fellow credit for having as much savvy as you have, and maybe a little more.”

— Louis L'Amour

284. “Treat the earth kindly, my friends, and it will give you comfort, security, and all a man may need. If you plant a flake of gold in the earth, will anything come of it? But plant a seed and it will repay you many times over.”

— Louis L'Amour

285. “Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.”

— Louis L'Amour

286. “Quit crabbing,” Bert said mildly. “We’re here now, and we’ve got to like it.”

— Louis L'Amour

287. “Folks in the wagon train figured Ma would turn back, but they hadn’t known Ma so long as I had. Once she set her mind to something she wasn’t about to quit.”

— Louis L'Amour

288. “You stick with him, no matter what. It’s all he’ll ever have, what you can give him.”

— Louis L'Amour

289. “There was much talk of sermons, also, and I gathered from this, as well as what Yance had told me, that sermons had much to do with shaping of thinking. There were a stiff-necked, proud folk, not easily persuaded to any course not dictated by conscience, yet conscience could be a poor guide if accompanied by lack of knowledge.”

— Louis L'Amour

290. “My folks built blood into the foundations of this country and I don’t aim to see them torn down for no reason whatsoever.”

— Louis L'Amour

291. “If at any time your Prince should pretend your position with him is sure, begin from that moment to feel unsure.”

— Louis L'Amour

292. “Don’t go for that gun,” I said quietly. “I want you tried in a court of law, not dead on this floor.”

— Louis L'Amour

293. “We must not lose touch with what we were, with what we had been, nor must we allow the well of our history to dry up, for a child without tradition is a child crippled before the world. Tradition can also be an anchor of stability and a shield to guard one from irresponsibility and hasty decision.”

— Louis L'Amour

294. “I have education and once I had position. Now I am nobody, but I am happy.”

— Louis L'Amour

295. “Caution always, but when a man acts he should act suddenly and with decision.”

— Louis L'Amour

296. “What we have most to fear, I believe, are those within our own borders who think less of country than of themselves, who are ambitious for money, for power, for land. Some of these men would subvert anything, anything at all, my dear sir, for their own profit. They would even twist the laws of their own country in their desire to acquire wealth or power.”

— Louis L'Amour

297. “A television picture or a movie might be lost forever, but your book is waiting.”

— Louis L'Amour

298. “Once he paused near a small stream to watch a dipper bob up and down on a rock. He saw a school of trout lurking in a shady place where a branch hung low on the water. No amount of seeing ever made nature old to him, and he was conscious of every movement and sound.”

— Louis L'Amour

299. “He realized what a fool he had been. There could be no tolerating of evil. One stamped it out or the evil grew worse.”

— Louis L'Amour

300. “Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing and no drugs are needed.”

— Louis L'Amour