Louis L'Amour Quotes

The door. Far down the street he could

It is a living. It is enough. I am free. The nights are long and quiet, the mornings cool and bright, I live with the sun, the moon, and the stars. The air is fresh where I am, and there is no one to hurry me or to demand this or that of me.

Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.

There will always be folks who will talk, and the better you do in the world the more bad things they will say of you. Back there in the settlement you remember how the dogs used to run out and bark at our wagons?"
"Yes, ma."
"Did the wagons stop?"
"No, ma."
"Remember that, son. The dogs bark, but the wagons go on their way, and if you're going some place you haven't time to bother with barking dogs.

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

Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain't good for nothin'. I believe what the old Quaker said, 'Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.

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.

How much can a man endure? How long could a man continue? These things I asked myself, for I am a questioning man, yet even as I asked the answers were there before me. If he be a man indeed, he must always go on, he must always endure. Death is an end to torture, to struggle, to suffering, but it is also an end to warmth, light, the beauty of a running horse, the smell of damp leaves, of gunpowder, the walk of a woman when she knows someone watches ... these things, too, are gone.

Do 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.

We were young then, and the West was young, with the land broad and bright before us. We knew, whatever the truth was, that every horse could be ridden, every man whipped, every girl loved.

Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for the trickster and catch him at the first attempt, but beware of an honest man. (said by the author to be a Somali saying)

Such are the amenities of social life, which oft makes a liar of the best of men.

Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

do you want to explain those?" He gestured

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

To be a man was to be responsible. It was as simple as that. To be a man was to build something, to try to make the world about him a bit easier to live in for himself and those who followed.
You could sneer at that, you could scoff, you could refuse to acknowledge it, but when it came right down to it, Conn decided it was the man who planted a tree, dug a well, or graded a road who mattered.

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.

Mountains should not be judged by altitude.

And then there's the gun itself. No man in his right mind will play with a gun. I've seen show-offs doing fancy spins and all that. No real gun-fighter ever did. With a hair-trigger, he'd be likely to blow a hole in his belly. The gun-fighter knows enough of guns to be wary of them. He treats them with respect. A pistol was never made for anything except killing, and a gunfighter never draws a gun unless to shoot, and he shoots to kill.

What we did not possess we had to make for ourselves or learn to do without, but the little I learned helped me to build a defense against the change that time would surely bring, to teach me that to live was to change, and that change was the one irrevocable law. Nothing remained the same.

When you go to a country, you must learn how to say two things: how to ask for food, and to tell a woman that you love her. Of these the second is more important, for if you tell a woman you love her, she will certainly feed you.

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.

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.

Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.

You stick with him, no matter what. It's all he'll ever have, what you can give him.

From a blow. His yellow eyes clung to von Hallstatt. He desperately

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

Hitting his enormous body was useless. I might as well have pounded a huge leather sack filled with wheat. So

No. Until man can order his own affairs, until he ceases to prey on his brothers, he will need someone to maintain order. A lawman is not a restraint, but a freedom, a liberation. He restrains only those who would break the laws and provides freedom for the rest of us to work, to laugh, to sing, to play in peace.

Most men never discover what they've got inside. A man has to face up to trouble before he knows.

You are an educated man, Old One.'
'What is education besides a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life? There are many kinds of education, and often education closes as many doors as it opens for to believe implies disbelief. One accepts one kind of belief but closes the mind to all that is, or seems to be contradictory.

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.

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.

There are shadows for the shadows of things, as a reflection seen in a mirror of a mirror. We know there are circles within circles and dimensions beyond dimension. Reality is itself a shadow, only an appearance accepted by those whose eyes shun what might lie beyond.

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

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

Nobody is ever convinced by argument, anyway. They just think up new reasons for maintaining old positions and become more defensive.

Much of command is the ability to take command.

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.

I have reverence for truth, but I do not know what truth is. I suspect there are many truths, and therefore, I suspect all who claim to have the truth.

There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

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

I do not think that one should demand that love be forever. Perhaps it is better that it not be forever. How can one answer for more than the moment? Who knows what strange tides may sweep us away? What depths there may be, or twists and turns and shallows? Each life sails a separate course, although sometimes, and this is the best of times, two lives may move along together until the end of time.

Sometimes we have the dream but we are not ourselves ready for the dream. We have to grow to meet it.

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.

The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.

There will be blood," he said quietly, "blood and death. You should not have come."
"Since when was a woman afraid of blood?" she asked. "The problem is not only Sean's. It is mine also. If there is to be blood, I will share in the letting or the losing of it.

As the days went by, I began to see this girl I had married was even more than I had suspected and in every way.

I never saw a man get superior so fast.

if trouble comes, stand aside and watch what a woman can do!

See perhaps four and a half miles, and the lookout

The savage is never far from the surface in any of us, but because we know he is there we fight it down.

Men strive for peace, but it is their enemies that give them strength, and I think if man no longer had enemies, he would have to invent them, for his strength only grows from struggle.

- This Indian wife you have ...
- Had. She's dead.
- I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up
an unhappy memory.
- I can't remember anything unhappy
about Destarte.

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.

My father had lived through wars and troubles, and it left him with a sense that nothing lasted but what a man made of himself.

Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic. But sometimes one is guided through the maze by intuition. One is led by something felt in the wind, something seen in the stars, something that calls from the wasteland to the spirit.
To receive the message, the mental pores must be open. And we white men in striving for our success, in seeking to build a new world from what lies around us, sometimes forget that there are other ways, sometimes forget the Lonesome Gods of the far places, the gods who live on the empty sea, who dance with the dust devils and who wait quietly in the shadows under the cliffs where ancient men once marked their passing with hands.

I'm like a big old hen. I can't cluck too long about the egg I've just laid because I've got 5 more inside me pushing to get out.

Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.

My lady had the body of a siren, the face of a goddess, and the mind of an Armenian camel dealer.

It has often been said that we have but one life to live; that is nonsense. If one reads fiction he or she can live a thousand lives, in many parts of the world or in outer space.

The word was out that Royal Barnes was huntin' Kilkenny," somebody commented. "He was kin to the Webers, you know. Half-brother, I think.

For our age-old enemies await us always, just beyond our thin walls. Hunger, thirst, and cold lie waiting there, and forever among us are those who would loot, rape, and maim rather than behave as civilized men.
If we sit secure this hour, this day, it is because the thin walls of the law stand between us and evil. A jolt of the earth, a revolution, an invasion or even a violent upset in our own government can reduce all to chaos, leaving civilized man naked and exposed.

And where, in my time, would my body lie?

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

I don't believe you know anything about a man like me or a country like this. It takes rough men, Miss Fair, to tame a rough country; rough men, but good men. Your father is in that class. As for you, I don't think you'd measure up, and you'll do well to leave it. You're a hothouse flower, very soft, very appealing and very useless ... In the world you are going to, men want pretty useless women. They want toys for their lighte moments, and we have those women out here, too, only we have another name for them. We want women who can make a home, and if need be, handle a rifle.

When 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.

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.

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.

Once he paused near a small stream to watch a dipper bob up and down on a rock. He saw a school of trout lurking in a shady place where a branch hung low on the water. No amount of seeing ever made nature old to him, and he was conscious of every movement and sound.

about him, although not many

Staring out at the sunlit street. It was a whole lot simpler out

Caution always, but when a man acts he should act suddenly and with decision.

The trouble with being on the wrong side of the law was the kind of company you had to keep.

Not even a marshrat will trust itself to one hole only, so always have an escape route, and more than one, if it can be.

He had seemed huge and fat. He was all of that, but he was also a man of unbelievable strength. His

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

The way I figure, no man has the right to be ignorant. In a country like this, ignorance is a crime. If a man is going to vote, if he's going to take part in his country and its government, then it's up to him to understand.

She did not believe me. "You do not worship the Sun."
"The sun gives life to all things. Without the sun this would be a dark, dead world. Perhaps," I added, "the spirit we worship is the same, and only the names are different. The message from He who rules over us all may come to each people in a different way.

Too often she had listened to her father discourse on the necessity for peace and consideration of others. She believed in that policy wholeheartedly. The fact that occasionally violence was necessary did not alter her convictions one whit. No system of philosophy or ethics, no growth of goverenment, no improvement in living came without trial and struggle. Struggle, she had often heard her father say, was the law of growth. Without giving too much thought to it, she understood that such men as Rafe Caradec, Trigger Boyne, Tex Brisco and others of their ilk were needed. For all their violence, their occasional heedlessness and their desire to go their own way, they were building a new world in a rough and violent land where everything tended to extremes. Mountains were high, the praires wide, the streams roaring, the buffalo by the thousand, and tens of thousand. It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes.

I was raised up where folks looked to the hills, only up where we came from you hadn't chance to look much higher, we were that near the top of the ridge.

In Bowdrie's limited vocabulary, to be responsible was the most important word.

Her eyes went again to the man in black. He had removed his hat when he seated himself and she noticed that his hair was black and curly. He was a lean, powerfully built man, probably larger than he looked while seated. Her eyes trailed again to the bandage. "You ... you've hurt yourself!" she exclaimed. "Your shoulder!" Embarrassed

The call of the horizon finds quick response in the heart of every wanderer.

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

Kept him from going forward. His innate caution

She handed him the blankets and the ground sheet and he shook them out, then put them down under the trees. Angie got down on her knees and spread the ground sheet over the leaves, then the blankets.
'You never forget do you? I mean about seeing things first.'
'Hope I never.'
He was oddly uncomfortable, hesitant. 'Good way to lose your hair, not noticing things.'
He sat down and pulled off his boots. The cottonwoods whispered more softly. The squirrel gave one short inquiring chatter, then was silent.
The lone coyote spoke to the sky and the stream rustled busily about the stones. A bit of mud fell into the stream with a faint plop.
It was night and there was no sound. Or anyway, not very much. (p 154)

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

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.

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

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.

The whole town was like that. Probably there weren't three men in town who had not used guns, and used them a lot.

What is today accepted as truth will tomorrow prove to be only amusing.

There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.

Victory is not won in miles but in inches.

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

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

Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way.

In 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.

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