Louis L'Amour Quotes

Many people know how to get money, but few know how to keep it. Wise investments are always based on information, Johannes, so the more you know, the better.

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

Another thing Pa taught me: If you’re going to fight … fight. Talk about it after.

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.

The Bible, of course, for aside from religion there is much to be learned of men and their ways in the Bible. It is also a source of comments made of references and figures of speech. No man could consider himself educated without some knowledge of it.

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

I was by no means a scholar, simply an interested reader with nothing to do but live and learn.

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.

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume that there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand. 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 any education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline. 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 planes. 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?

We are all of us, it has been said, the children of immigrants and foreigners — even the American Indian, although he arrived here a little earlier. What a man is and what he becomes is in part due to his heritage, and the men and women who came west did not emerge suddenly from limbo. Behind them were ancestors, families, and former lives. Yet even as the domestic cattle of Europe evolved into the wild longhorns of Texas, so the American pioneer had the characteristics of a distinctive type. Physically and psychologically, the pioneers' need for change had begun in the old countries with their decision to migrate. In most cases their decisions were personal, ordered by no one else. Even when migration was ordered or forced, the people who survived were characterized by physical strength, the capacity to endure, and not uncommonly, a rebellious nature. History is not made only by kings and parliaments, presidents, wars, and generals. It is the story of people, of their love, honor, faith, hope and suffering; of birth and death, of hunger, thirst and cold, of loneliness and sorrow. In writing my stories I have found myself looking back again and again to origins, to find and clearly see the ancestors of the pioneers.

The more one learns the more he understands his ignorance. I am simply an ignorant man, trying to lessen his ignorance.

I am merely a seeker after knowledge, taking the world for my province, for it seems all knowledge is interrelated, and each science is dependent to some extent on the others. We study the stars that we may know more about our earth, and herbs that we may know medicine better.

The trees are aware, and the bushes. The birds and small animals are aware, and they listen, hesitant, suspecting. Awareness of danger is an element of their being. It is like their breathing, like the blood in their veins, and one who lives much with the wilderness become so aware, too... Half of woodcraft is attention, and all of survival.

Since I was a small boy, I had watched that forest for enemies or for game, and I knew its every mood and shading, how the sunlight fell through the leaves and where the shadows gathered. It held no mysteries for me but much of memory. I had played there as a child with Yance, Jubal, and Brian, later with Noelle. We had climbed its trees, picked berries there, and played hide-and-seek under its branches.

It is not enough to do, one must also become.