Quotes by Louis L'Amour

Ive a regard for law, although I do not always agree with it. Without law, man becomes a beast.

It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.

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.

Shed never been one to think in terms of years, anyway. A person was what they were, and many a man at forty was sixty in his ways and many another was twenty and would never grow past it.

No man is a complete ruler or dictator. He is only the mouthpiece for the wishes of his followers. As long as he expresses those wishes, he leads them.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief.

A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first

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?

It had been my fathers way to remove obstructions, to repair washouts in old trails, to leave each trail better than he had found it. Tread lightly on the paths, he had told me. Others will come when you have gone.That was how I would remember my father. There was never a place he walked that was not the better for his having passed. For every tree he cut down he planted two.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

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

A man shares his days with hunger thirst and cold with the good times and the bad and the first part of being a man is to understand that.

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.

She had believed the land was her enemy and she struggled against it but you could not make war against a land any more than you could against the sea. One had to learn to live with it to belong to it to fit into its seasons and its ways.

You cant fight the desert... you have to ride with it.

To exist is to adapt and if one could not adapt one died and made room for those who could.

A body shouldnt heed what might be. Hes got to do with what is.

Men strive for peace but it is their enemies that give them strength and I think if man no longer had enemies he would have to invent them for his strength only grows from struggle.