Louis L'Amour Quotes

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

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

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

I sat very still, as befitted a small boy among strangers, staring wide-eyed into a world I did not know. I was six years old and my father was dying.

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.

If one has a book, Mr. Boone, One is never alone. They will talk to you when you want to listen, and when you tire of what they are saying, you just close the book. It will be waiting for you when you come back to it.

There are two kinds of people in the world, son, those who wish and those who will. The wishers wish to be rich, they wish to be famous, they wish to own a farm or a fine house or whatever. The ones who will, they don't wish, they start out and do it. They become what they want to or they get what they want. They will it.

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.

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.

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 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.

for the bringer of meat is welcome at any fire.

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.

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.

We are a people of the frontier, born to it, bred to it, looking always toward it. And when the frontiers of our own land are gone, when we have drawn them all into an ordered world, then we must seek other frontiers, the frontiers of the mind beyond which men have not gone, the frontiers that lie out beyond the stars, the frontiers that lie within our own selves, that hold us back from what we would do, what we would achieve.