Louis L'Amour Quotes

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.

It was the kind of a country where if you worked with a man and ate his bread, you bought some of his troubles, too.

This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.

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.

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

I’ve written all these stories without any pornography, without any obscenity. I grew up among sailors and miners and lumberjacks and the roughest kind men in the world, but I never found it necessary to use all that in the stories. I can make them real without that. I think much of that kind of writing is a coverup for lack of real skill.

You are complex." "No. Within this giant house of flesh lives a quiet man who would prefer working at a trade. Or perhaps he is a poet whose dreams are too large for his words. "My home is among the mountains. Men destroy what they do not understand, as they destroyed the son of God when he chose to walk among them. I do not wish to be understood. I wish to be left alone. Your Johannes has done this. He is a kind man, a thoughtful man." "Are you never lonely?" "When would I not be lonely? When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is. I am a man apart but have become adjusted to it. I have the mountains, and I have my books. I also have the friendship of Johannes.

Sometimes, when crossing a pass in the mountains, one will see a pile of loose stones, even several piles. Foolish people have dug into them, thinking treasure is buried there. It is a stupid idea, to think a treasure would be marked so obviously. 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. I never fail to toss a stone on the pile, Hannes. In my own way it is a small offering to those lonesome gods. A man once told me they do the same thing in Tibet, and some of our ancient people may have come from there, or near there. Regardless of that, I like to think those ancient gods are out there waiting, and that they are, because of my offerings, a little less lonely.

He realized what a fool he had been. There could be no tolerating of evil. One stamped it out or the evil grew worse.

Long ago, before the Indians who live here now, there were other people. Perhaps they went away, or maybe they died or were driven out by these Indians’ ancestors, but they are gone. Yet sometimes I am not sure they are gone. I think sometimes their spirits are still around, in the land they loved. Each people has its gods, or the spirits in which they believe. It may be their god is the same as ours, only clothed in different stories, different ideas, but a god can only be strong, Hannes, if he is worshiped, and the gods of those ancient people are lonesome gods now. They are out there in the desert and mountains, and perhaps their strength has waned because nobody lights fires on their altars anymore. But they are there, Hannes, and sometimes I think they know me and remember me.

There’s a saying that when guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns.

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.

"We will always have Reeses and Heseltines, and they will always seem big and brave to growing boys. They swagger and make loud noises in their own little circle, but they are only the coyotes that yap around the heels of the herd."
'Remember this, Shell, the coyotes aren't going anywhere, but the herd is, and so are the men who drive the herd.

"Can you see the future, Kerbouchard?"
"Who would wish to? Our lives hold a veil between anticipation and horror. Anticipation is the carrot suspended before the jackass to keep him moving forward. Horror is what he would see if he took his eyes off the carrot."

Thunder rolled like a distant avalanche in the mountain valleys.…