Top 300 Louis L'Amour Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.”

— Louis L'Amour

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

255. “At another time she had said, “Do not be afraid. A little fear can make one cautious. Too much fear can rob you of initiative. Respect fear, but use it for an incentive, do not let it bind you or tie you down.”

— Louis L'Amour

256. “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

257. “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

258. “What we did not possess we had to make for ourselves or learn to do without, but the little I learned helped me to build a defense against the change that time would surely bring, to teach me that to live was to change, and that change was the one irrevocable law. Nothing remained the same.”

— Louis L'Amour

259. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

265. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

285. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

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

— Louis L'Amour

295. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

297. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

299. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour