Louis L'amour Quotes

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

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

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

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.

The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.

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

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

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

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.

When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.

I am somebody. I am me. And I don't need anybody to make me somebody.

Have faith in God but keep your powder dry.

Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.

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

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.

Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.

One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Reading without thinking is nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.

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.

I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.

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.

Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.

A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.

Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.

Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to pieces. Or love can be a thing that endures, a rich, deep current flowing unending through the years.

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.

We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.

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.

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.

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

There is nothing more dangerous than a woman with a shotgun. Because you don't know when it's going to go off...and neither does she.

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

Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees.

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

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.

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

If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. 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.

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

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.

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.

To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.

I wonder why it is the man who pleads for mercy never gives it.

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.

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.

If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.

A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind.

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

We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on

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

when guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns.

Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.

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.

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.

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.

No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.

Personally, I do not believe the human mind has any limits but those we impose ourselves.

. . . What do you wish to be? What would you like to become?” I did not know, and I told her so, but the question worried me. Should I know? “There is time,” she said, “but the sooner you know, the sooner you can plan. To have a goal is the important thing, and to work toward it. Then, if you decide you wish to do something different, you will at least have been moving, you will have been going somewhere, you will have been learning.

The terrorist lives for terror, not for the change he tells himself he wants. He masks his desire to kill and destroy behind the curtain of a cause. It is destruction he wants, not creation.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do

No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.

One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.

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.

I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.

The mind is a basket . . . if you put nothing in, you get nothing out.

A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.

To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.

Like I say, I killed a man or two but I'm no thief. My ma raised me better.

What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life.

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

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

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 yours forever.

After a few days, I mused, I would have no trouble. Whoever heard of a revolution of fat men?

It is not enough to do, one must also become. I wish to be wiser, stronger, better. This--" I held out my hands "--this thing that is me is incomplete. It is only the raw material with which I have to work. I want to make it better than I received it.

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.

A journey is time suspended.

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

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)

Womenfolks have powerful imaginations when it comes to a man, an’ she can read things into him he never knew was there, and like as not, they ain’t!

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

Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and plains. 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?

You can make laws against weapons but they will be observed only by those who don't intend to use them anyway. The lawless can always smuggle or steal or even make a gun. By refusing to wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity.

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.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

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.

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

Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.

Destarte! How musical! What does it mean?" "You can't say it except in Mescalero. It means Morning, but that isn't what it means, either. Indian words are more than just that. They also mean the feel and the sound of the name. It means like Crack of Dawn, the first bronze light that makes the buttes stand out against the gray desert. It means the first sound you hear of a brook curling over some rocks-some trout jumping and a beaver crooning. It means the sound a stallion makes when he whistles at some mares just as the first puff of wind kicks up at daybreak. "It means like you get up in the first light and you and her go out of the wickiup, where it smells smoky and private and just you and her, and kind of safe with just the two of you there, and you stand outside and smell the first bite of the wind coming down from the high divide and promising the first snowfall. Well, you just can't say what it means in English. Anyway, that was her name. Destarte.

There can be no living together without understanding, and understanding means compromise. Compromise is not a dirty word, it is the cornerstone of civilization, just as politics is the art of making civilization work. Men do not and cannot and hopefully will never think alike, hence each must yield a little in order to avoid war, to avoid bickering. Men and women meet together and adjust their differences, this is compromise. He who stands unyielding and immovable upon a principle is often a fool, and often bigoted, and usually left standing alone with his principle while other men adjust their differences and go on.

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.

Rien n'est jamais acquis à l'homme Ni sa force Ni sa faiblesse ni son coeur Et quand il croit Ouvrir ses bras son ombre est celle d'une croix Et quand il croit serrer son bonheur il le broie Sa vie est un étrange et douloureux divorce Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux Sa vie Elle ressemble à ces soldats sans armes Qu'on avait habillés pour un autre destin A quoi peut leur servir de se lever matin Eux qu'on retrouve au soir désoeuvrés incertains Dites ces mots Ma vie Et retenez vos larmes Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux Mon bel amour mon cher amour ma déchirure Je te porte dans moi comme un oiseau blessé Et ceux-là sans savoir nous regardent passer Répétant après moi les mots que j'ai tressés Et qui pour tes grands yeux tout aussitôt moururent Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux Le temps d'apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard Que pleurent dans la nuit nos coeurs à l'unisson Ce qu'il faut de malheur pour la moindre chanson Ce qu'il faut de regrets pour payer un frisson Ce qu'il faut de sanglots pour un air de guitare Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux Il n'y a pas d'amour qui ne soit à douleur Il n'y a pas d'amour dont on ne soit meurtri Il n'y a pas d'amour dont on ne soit flétri Et pas plus que de toi l'amour de la patrie Il n'y a pas d'amour qui ne vive de pleurs Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux Mais c'est notre amour à tous les deux