Quotes & Sayings About L Amour

And that was the way it was in the old days before the country grew up and men put their guns away. Someday, and I hope it never comes, there may be a time when the Western hills are empty again and the land will go back to wilderness and the old, hard ways. Enemies may come into our country and times will have changed, but then the boys will come down from the old high hills and belt on their guns again. They can do it if they have to. The guns are hung up, the cows roam fat and lazy, but the old spirit is still there, just as it was when the longhorns came up the trail from Texas, and the boys washed the creeks for gold. — Louis L'Amour

I never liked the term mystic as applied to someone or a way of thought. It covers something very profound and an awful lot of nonsense passes as profound thought. — Louis L'Amour

Let me leave you with a positive thought. William Shakespeare once wrote: "The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite." They call this the Hidden Economy and it is not based on greed or love of money, but on unconditional, selfless, boundless and unstinting Love. — Etienne De L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

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 ... — Louis L'Amour

Such are the amenities of social life, which oft makes a liar of the best of men. — Louis L'Amour

A move well planned is a move half-done, and I tried to think through every phase. We — Louis L'Amour

There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man. — Louis L'Amour

I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education. — Louis L'Amour

See perhaps four and a half miles, and the lookout — Louis L'Amour

Shut up!" Joe's tone was ugly. "If you ain't willing to try, you can go to hell. — Louis L'Amour

A book is valuable not only for what it says but for what it makes you think, or causes you to remember. No matter what you wish to do or become there are books to teach you, help you, guide you. — Louis L'Amour

Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again. — Louis L'Amour

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

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. — Louis L'Amour

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

He might never really do what he said, but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go. — Louis L'Amour

When a man lives with the wilderness he comes to an acceptance of death as a part of living, he sees the leaves fall and rot away to build the soil for other trees and plants to be born. The leaves gather strength from sun and rain, gathering the capital on which they live to return it to the soil when they die. Only for a time have they borrowed their life from the sum of things, using their small portion of sun, earth, and rain, some of the chemicals that go into their being - all to be paid back when death comes. All to be used again and again. — Louis L'Amour

If you're going to have peace rather than violence, both sides have got to want it. One side alone can't make peace. — Louis L'Amour

Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they've missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I've ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

Nulle cre ature humaine ne peut commander a' l'amour. No human being can give orders to love. — Sydney Samuelson

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. — 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

We must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think. — Louis L'Amour

How many time have I talked with people who have ridden the trails where I have ridden, yet had seen nothing? They passed over the land just to get over it, not to live with it and see it, feel it.
There was beauty out there ... — Louis L'Amour

The clouds hung like dark, blowing tapestries in the gaps of the hills. — Louis L'Amour

Don't go for that gun," I said quietly. "I want you tried in a court of law, not dead on this floor. — Louis L'Amour

Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party. — Louis L'Amour

He had fought for a principle, and because it was his nature to fight. — Louis L'Amour

When I was a small boy I often went to the woods to lie on the grass in the shade. Somehow I had come to believe the earth could give me wisdom, but it did not. Yet I learned a little about animals and learned it is not always brave to make a stand. It is often foolish. There is a time for courage and a time for flight. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves. — Louis L'Amour

No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations. — Louis L'Amour

To pursue a man effectively, it is best to begin with his thinking. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

No man is lost while he yet lives. — Louis L'Amour

This here's a hard country. If a man ain't fit, he can't last - Kilkenny — Louis L'Amour

The buzzards were neutral. No matter who won down there, they would win. They had but to wait. — Louis L'Amour

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. — Louis L'Amour

One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives. — Louis L'Amour

Who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship. — Louis L'Amour

You know I wouldn't know a Louis Vuitton from a Louis L'Amour — Juliet Blackwell

No telling what those men wanted ... but in these times there were white men with bloodier hands than any Indian ... — Louis L'Amour

Them Injuns. Takin' the country off 'em. In good times it must've been a fine life they had, huntin' and fishin' or driftin' down the country on the trail of the buffalo. I ain't sure what we'll do to the country will be any better. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

Unless one is at heart a rascal, I think he becomes a little better in many ways by assuming leadership. — Louis L'Amour

He had gathered about him what was considered by many to be the intellectual and artistic elite ... actually, a group of bored men and libertines who were glib-tongued, talking much of art, literature, and music but without any deep-seated convictions upon any subject aside from their own prejudices. Mainly concerned with their own posturing, they were creatures of fad and whim, seizing upon this writer or that composer and exalting him to the skies until he bored them, then shifting to some other. Occasionally, the artist upon whom they lavished attention were of genuine ability, but more often they possessed some obscurity that gave the dilettantes an illusion of depth and quality. In the majority of cases what was fancied to be profound was simply bad writing, bad painting, or deliberately affected obscurity. — Louis L'Amour

The desert preserves. What other lands destroy, the desert keeps. It accepts dead things, holds them close, and draws away the rot that would destroy; given time, it mummifies or crystalizes. — Louis L'Amour

Where can a man get a bite to eat?" the cowhand asked. "There's several restaurants, but if you can do with beef an' eggs, just set down over yonder and we can fix you up. They're fixin' breakfast for the boss right now," the bartender added, "and I'll just have them put on something extry." When the bartender saw — Louis L'Amour

From Caprock Rancher:
Another thing Pa taught me: If you're going to fight ... fight. Talk about it after. — Louis L'Amour

A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them. — Louis L'Amour

Have faith in God but keep your powder dry. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

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. — 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. Those who are truly wise will never permit such moments to escape. — Louis L'Amour

The beginning and the end of love are both marked by embarrassment when the two find themselves alone.
[Fr., Le commencement et le declin de l'amour se font sentir par l'embarras ou l'on est de se trouver seuls.] — Jean De La Bruyere

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

[Barnabas speaks] "I will drink water."
"Water? But water is not fit for men to drink. For the cattle, for birds and beast, but a man needs ale ... or wine, if you are a Frenchman." [William answers] — Louis L'Amour

Neither drink [coffee or tea] was known in Frankish lands, but seated in the coffeehouses, I drank of each at various times, twirling my moustache and listening with attention to that headier draught, the wine of the intellect, that sweet and bitter juice distilled from the vine of thought and the tree of man's experience. — 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

I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller,
the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered-
as a storyteller. A good storyteller. — Louis L'Amour

A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything. — Louis L'Amour

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. — Louis L'Amour

Yet Tanneman was a man grown up to danger and trouble, knowing nothing else, and for the first time he was acting with conscious, deliberate purpose. — Louis L'Amour

All that was speculation, and a man can get carried away by a reasonable theory. Often a man finds a theory that explains things and he builds atop that theory, finding all the right answers ... only the basic theory is wrong. But that's the last thing he will want to admit. — Louis L'Amour

They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

If they didn't accept him, the hell with them - he could go his own way. — Louis L'Amour

For a man with an education the world is a wide place and the opportunities are many — Louis L'Amour

A man who starts imagining that others think good because he does is simply out of his mind. I've helped bury a few who did think that way ... nice, peaceful men who wanted no trouble and made none.
When feeding time comes around there's nothing a hawk likes better than a nice, fat, peaceful dove. — Louis L'Amour

Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence. — Louis L'Amour

The trouble with being on the wrong side of the law was the kind of company you had to keep. — Louis L'Amour

The dancer becomes the dance. And I am the writing. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

A man can lose sight of everything else when he's bent on revenge, and it ain't worth it. — Louis L'Amour

My stories may seem to be the stories of men, but a check of my books will show that I have probably written the stories of more strong women than any other writer ... [examples include] Miss Nesselrode of The Lonesome Gods, Ruth Macken of Bendigo Shafter, Echo Sackett of Ride the River, Em Talon of Ride the Dark Trail are some ... [and] one of my favorites is Miss Jessica Trescott of Matagorda. (The Sackett Companion) — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

What is today accepted as truth will tomorrow prove to be only amusing. — Louis L'Amour

Filled with a new sense of purpose, I downed half my coffee at one draught. It was good, strong stuff, the kind that Louis L'Amour used to say could float a horseshoe. Nobody ever drank weak coffee in his books. It was probably why they were so anxious to shoot people at high noon. — Kevin Hearne

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think. — Louis L'Amour

You don't think marriage is serious?" "Of course, I do. It is the ultimate test of maturity, and many find excuses for avoiding it because they know they are not up to the challenge, or capable of carrying on a mature relationship. — Louis L'Amour

One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

The hidden economy [is] fed not by money and greed but by love, pure and simple. You see the best and truly golden opportunities do not arise to benefit oneself, but in order to benefit others. — Etienne De L'Amour

Pa had found it and brought gold from it, and pa must have come — Louis L'Amour

The way I see it, every time a man gets up in the morning he starts his life over. Sure, the bills are there to pay, and the job is there to do, but you don't have to stay in a pattern. You can always start over, saddle a fresh horse and take another trail. — Louis L'Amour

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

I wonder why it is the man who pleads for mercy never gives it. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

So many things that are so dramatic or exciting when you read about them actually happen so simply and quietly. We humans like to consider ourselves important to creation and to the world, and we expect that whenever death comes it should be with a crash of thunder and wild shouts or something, or with soft music around and people looking grave and serious. We always have it that way in the theatre because it makes us believe in our importance. Most of our life is a matter of dressing ourselves up to believe in just that, dressing ourselves in attractive clothes, in titles, in reputations. Actually, at base we all realize that we're just a frightened bundle of animals, still afraid of the unknown, and still afraid of thousands of things that can separate us from life, and trying to shield ourselves from our own smallness. — 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

Several other men played — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills - by destroying the American way of life. Radio — Louis L'Amour

Raindrops felt his cheeks with blind, questing fingers ... the black trunks of the trees were like iron bars against the gray of gathering pools. Radigan — Louis L'Amour

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. — Louis L'Amour