Louis L'Amour Quotes - Page 2

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

Now, tomorrow Miss Laurie McCrae and me, we have an appointment with a sky pilot who will make it proper for us to travel in double harness.

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

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

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.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.

You can't fight the desert... you have to ride with it.

Our world is made up of a myriad of microcosms, of tiny worlds, each with its own habitues, every one known to the others.

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

It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, 'He was a man who didn't believe in violence, He's a good man... and dead.

A 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.

Many a small man is considered good while he remains small, but let power come to him, and he becomes a raging fury.

I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.

You would be wise" he agreed, "To go to Cordoba or Toledo. The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is forever.

It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.

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 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

Never can tell when you might come on somebody needs skinning.

The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.

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

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?

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

Hate would destroy him who hated.

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

Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.

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?

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.

Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.

...he'd had the foresight to know that a lot of the savages wear store-bought clothes.

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.

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

I'm sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it!""You will hate the next place, too," I said. "What you are you will carry with you.

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.

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.

Folks can’t seem to realize that it isn’t a smooth talker we need in there but a steady man, a man with judgement. Any medicine-show man can spout words, if they are written for him. It takes no genius to sound well. To act right and at the right time is something else again.

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.

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

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

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.

...if we are to become a land of homes and people, evil men must not be allowed to persist in their evil.

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

Evil comes often to a man with money; tyranny comes surely to him without it. I say this, who am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a homeless wanderer upon the earth's far roads. I speak as one who has known hunger and feast, poverty and riches, the glory of the sword and the humility of the defenseless. Hunger inspires no talent, and carried too far, it deadens the faculties and destroys initiative...

She had believed the land was her enemy and she struggled against it but you could not make war against a land any more than you could against the sea. One had to learn to live with it to belong to it to fit into its seasons and its ways.

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

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