Louis L'Amour Quotes

The thieves and killers are goin' to have guns, so if the honest men don't have 'em they just make it easier for the vicious.

Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.

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

There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.

A man in his life may have many teachers, some most unexpected. The question lies with the man himself: Will he learn from them?

The fact of the matter is that poor men do not often steal, and when they do, it is petty theft, something to eat or perhaps an item of clothing to keep them from the cold. Thieves are usually those who have something and want more.

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.

Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.

Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic.

After a few days, I mused, I would have no trouble. Whoever heard of a revolution of fat men?

violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.

A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.

No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.

Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.

There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man.

There is nothing more dangerous than a woman with a shotgun. Because you don't know when it's going to go off...and neither does she.

A good beginning makes a good end.

The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.

A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.

A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.

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.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.

The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.

There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles -famine, disease and such-like -and some folks are born with money, some with none. In the end it is up to the man what he becomes, and none of those other things matters. It is character that counts.

A little rest and meditation often saves a lot of riding over rough country.

Man needs so little... yet he begins wanting so much.

Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.

He never knew when he was whipped ... So he never was.

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.

One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

There's no stopping a man who knows he's in the right and keeps a-coming.

A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. 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.

Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.

You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.

Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.

All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.

This-this was what made life: a moment of quiet, the water falling in the fountain, the girl's voice. . . a moment of captured beauty. Those who are truly wise will never permit such moments to escape.

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.

At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.

The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

I fear there will be no future for those who do not change.

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

The Apache don't have a word for love," he said. "Know what they both say at the marriage? The squaw-taking ceremony?" "Tell me." "Varlebena. It means forever. That's all they say.

It is an old custom of these people to pick up a stone and toss it on the pile. Perhaps it is a symbolical lightening of the load they carry, perhaps a small offering to the gods of the trails.