Top 201 Quotes & Sayings by Louis L'Amour
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Louis L'Amour.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places.
I think it's time that we have a women's show about the West. The concentration has been on the men and the Indians.
If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.
I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.
A good beginning makes a good end.
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.
I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.
Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.
To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.
Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.
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.
No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
He might never really do what he said, but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go.
No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.
I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.
The 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.
I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.
Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.
A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.
A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.
Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
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.
I think of myself... as a troubadour, a village storyteller, the guy in the shadows of the campfire.
All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.
My future is one I must make myself.
When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.
Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to pieces. Or love can be a thing that endures, a rich, deep current flowing unending through the years.
Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.
Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.
Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.
Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.
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.
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.
The 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.
You are your own best teacher. My advice is to question all things. Seek for answers, and when you find what seems to be an answer, question that, too.
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.
If 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.
We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.
Power not only corrupts he who wields the power but those who submit to it. Those who grovel at the feet of power betray their fellows to hide themselves behind the cloak of submission. It is an evil thing.
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.
A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind.
There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.
Some say opportunity knocks only once, that is not true. Opportunity knocks all the time, but you have to be ready for it. If the chance comes, you must have the equipment to take advantage of it.
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.
Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.
A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.
The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.
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.
There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.
One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.
A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
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.
The saddle is a place for dreaming when there's hours of trail ahead.
When 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.
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.
I am somebody. I am me. And I don't need anybody to make me somebody.
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