Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.
Louis L'AmourActors, politicians, and writers-all of us are but creatures of the hour. Long-lasting fame comes to but few.
Louis L'AmourIf you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.
Louis L'AmourA man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything.
Louis L'AmourAny man can shoot a gun, and with practice he can draw fast and shoot accurately, but that makes no difference. What counts is how you stand up when somebody is shooting back at you.
Louis L'AmourWhen corruption is visited upon the cities of men, the mountains and the deserts await him. The cities are for money but the high-up hills are purely for the soul.
Louis L'AmourThe idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
Louis L'AmourA mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.
Louis L'AmourA man shares his days with hunger, thirst, and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that.
Louis L'AmourDo you wish to learn? There are books that can teach you anything, and there is no cheaper form of education, nor one whose effects are more lasting. My education came from books, and they have been my companions by many campfires, in bunkhouses, ships' forecastles, in hotels and on planes. No matter where you find me, I am never far from a book.
Louis L'AmourI 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'AmourI have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.
Louis L'AmourBeing scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighter out of him.
Louis L'AmourWhen at the typewriter I am no longer where I site but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed.
Louis L'AmourToo often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
Louis L'AmourThe one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring.
Louis L'AmourTo exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.
Louis L'AmourIn 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'AmourHistorical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'AmourI 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'AmourThrow a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps the loudest is usually the one that got hit.
Louis L'AmourKnowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
Louis L'AmourI have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.
Louis L'AmourWhen I die, remember that what you knew of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the man. Remember the father.
Louis L'AmourThe wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.
Louis L'AmourNeither drink [coffee or tea] was known in Frankish lands, but seated in the coffeehouses, I drank of each at various times, twirling my moustache and listening with attention to that headier draught, the wine of the intellect, that sweet and bitter juice distilled from the vine of thought and the tree of man's experience.
Louis L'Amour