Louis L'Amour Quotes

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
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
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
A wise man fights to win but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.
Louis L'Amour
It is better to have no emotion when it is work. Do what needs to be done and do it coolly.
Louis L'Amour
Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now hold your ground and later win a little more.
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
Few of us ever live in the present we are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
Louis L'Amour
For you and me today is all we have tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.
Louis L'Amour
I fear there will be no future for those who do not change.
Louis L'Amour
I have been nothing ... but there is tomorrow.
Louis L'Amour
Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today that I shall be tomorrow.
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
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
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
My future is one I must make myself.
Louis L'Amour
I am somebody. I am me. I like being me. And I need nobody to make me somebody.
Louis L'Amour
A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
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
Being scared can keep a man from getting killed and often makes a better fighter of him.
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
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
He never knew when he was whipped ... so he never was.
Louis L'Amour
A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
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
Being scared can keep a man from getting killed and often makes a better fighter of him.
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
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
He never knew when he was whipped ... so he never was.
Louis L'Amour
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.
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
He might never really do what he said but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go.
Louis L'Amour
Man needs so little ... yet he begins wanting so much.
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
Revenge could steal a man's life until there was nothing left but emptiness.
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
Hate would destroy him who hated.
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
To disbelieve is easy to scoff is simple to have faith is harder.
Louis L'Amour
Any man can shoot a gun and with practice he can draw fast and shoot accurately but that makes no difference. What counts is how you stand up when somebody is shooting back at you.
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
What a man wants to do he generally can do if he wants to badly enough.
Louis L'Amour
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.
Louis L'Amour
Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.
Louis L'Amour
A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
Louis L'Amour
To exist is to adapt and if one could not adapt one died and made room for those who could.
Louis L'Amour
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
Louis L'Amour
One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.
Louis L'Amour
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.
Louis L'Amour
You can't fight the desert... you have to ride with it.
Louis L'Amour
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.
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
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
It had been my father's way to remove obstructions, to repair washouts in old trails, to leave each trail better than he had found it. "Tread lightly on the paths," he had told me. "Others will come when you have gone."That was how I would remember my father. There was never a place he walked that was not the better for his having passed. For every tree he cut down he planted two.
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
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
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 really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
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
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