Louis L'amour Quotes

The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil, or spirit, might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?

~ Louis L'amour

People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.

~ Louis L'amour

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

~ Louis L'amour

People have a greater tolerance for evil than for violence. If crooked gamboling, thieving and robing are covered over folks will tolerate it longer than out right violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.

~ Louis L'amour

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.

~ Louis L'amour

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.

~ Louis L'amour

It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.

~ Louis L'amour

I 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'amour

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

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

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

~ Louis L'amour

I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief.

~ Louis L'amour

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

Nobody should ever try to second-guess history, the facts are fantastic enough.

~ Louis L'amour

To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.

~ Louis L'amour

What a man wants to do he generally can do if he wants to badly enough.

~ Louis L'amour

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.

~ Louis L'amour

To disbelieve is easy to scoff is simple to have faith is harder.

~ Louis L'amour

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

~ Louis L'amour

There was a Texas Ranger one time who said that there's no stopping a man who knows he's in the right and keeps a-coming.

~ Louis L'amour

One thing we learned. To make a start and keep plugging. When I had fights at school the little while I went I just bowed my neck and kept swinging until something hit the dirt. Sometimes it was me but I always got up.

~ Louis L'amour

Being scared can keep a man from getting killed and often makes a better fighter of him.

~ Louis L'amour

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

~ Louis L'amour

I am somebody. I am me. I like being me. And I need nobody to make me somebody.

~ Louis L'amour

My future is one I must make myself.

~ Louis L'amour

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment heredity and movements and changes in the world about him then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. ... Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today that I shall be tomorrow.

~ Louis L'amour

I would not sit waiting for some value tomorrow nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime. ... I would make something happen.

~ Louis L'amour

Pa he always said a man had to look spry for himself because nobody would do it for him your opportunities didn't come knocking around you had to hunt them down and hog-tie them.

~ Louis L'amour

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. He who is truly wise will never permit such moments to escape.

~ Louis L'amour

Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy.

~ Louis L'amour

The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.

~ Louis L'amour

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

~ Louis L'amour

To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

~ Louis L'amour

A good beginning makes a good end.

~ Louis L'amour

Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.

~ Louis L'amour

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

~ Louis L'amour

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.

~ Louis L'amour

No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.

~ Louis L'amour

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.

~ Louis L'amour

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.

~ Louis L'amour