Louis L'Amour citations

Page 2

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

“Have faith in God but keep your powder dry.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He never knew when he was whipped… So he never was…….”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.”

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

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

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

“This was the beginning of something, yet I had ventured back into a world from which I had come and found it an alien world of which I was no longer a part.  In a sense I had always been alien. My Druidic training had taken me deep into a past that held more than the present, and along with it had been my father’s accounts, returning home after voyages, of a world beyond our shores. I had mingled with the men of his crews, almost half of which had come from other lands, other cultures, until I had become a stranger in my own land.”

“A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.”