Louis L'Amour Quotes

The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil, or spirit, might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?
We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?

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.

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

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.

Once, when hitchhiking, I was picked up by a professor from some small college. He noticed a book in my coat pocket, and was curious. It was a Modern Library edition, in the limp bindings they used to have, which sold at the time for 95 cents. This one contained Nietzsche‎‎'s Ecce Homo, and The Birth of Tragedy. The professor was a pedantic man of limited imagination and seemed almost offended that I was reading such a book. Obviously I did not fit some category in which he decided I belonged, and when he dropped me off in town, I suspect he was relived to be rid of me. He kept asking me why I wanted to read such a book. At first, he doubted I was reading it. Where had I heard of Nietzsche‎‎? When I told him I thought it was in the preface to a book on Schopenhauer, he was even more disturbed and probably believed I was lying. Fortunately, there seem to be few of his kind, and my subsequent friendships with university professors have proved exciting, stimulating and fun.

What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

No man can put a rope on the past and hope to snub it down. The best thing is to learn to it ride the new trails - Kilkenny

"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."

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

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.

There are men who prefer to keep trouble from a woman, but it seems to me that is neither reasonable nor wise. I've always respected the thinking of women, and also their ability to face up to trouble when it comes, and it shouldn't be allowed to come on them unexpected.

it is better to eat when one can, for one never knows when he will eat again.

Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance. He knows well the limits of his knowledge and how much is waiting to be learned.

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

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.