Quotes from Louis L'Amour

I've learned a little, but I know there is so much more. My father always said that was the wonderful thing about learning, that there was no end to it.

Lila brought him to me, my hands still hot from battle, the smell of powder smoke about me, and I took him carefully, for I'd no knowledge of babies, and held him gently and looked in his face, his eyes squinted and dark, his face still red and pinched, but he looked at me and seemed to laugh and grasped my thumb and tugged strongly. Oh, he was a lad, that one!

A walking man will kick the grass down in the direction of travel, but a horse with the swinging movements of its hoofs will knock the grass down so it points in the direction from which it has come.

Slow down, you'll have a more harmonious outcome

They know that when a man holds a gun he more

the very idea of taking a risk that was not demanded by circumstances was repugnant to him.

Empty gun's no use to anybody, ma'am. If you need that, you'll need it fast.

Sure as you tell somethin' to one person, they will tell somebody else, an' warn them not to tell. Of course, they do.

He did not take chances, but had helped to bury men who did.

He had been the best of fathers and it was never easy to be a father to strong sons growing up in a strange land, each coming to manhood, each asserting himself, loving the father yet wishing to be free of him, finding fault to make the break easier. So it had been since the world began, for the young do not remain young and the time must come when each must go out on his own grass. I

How often it is that a whim may alter the course of our existences! How often the simple decision whether to go right or left when one leaves a doorway can change so much! A man may turn to the right and walk straightaway into all manner of evil, and to the left, all manner of good.

I had already learned to listen to the advice of others but to act only on my own beliefs, and to make my own decisions.

I am one who lives to learn.

Or do you realize that when any freedom is destroyed for others, it is destroyed for you, too?

A sword?" I was astonished. "It is a man's weapon.

came up on the porch, I noticed that Helen's eyes went at once to the book I had been reading.

next to the Bible more great men had read Plutarch than any other book.

make the drive, skirting the mesa

Society is not taking revenge. It is simply eliminating someone who refuses to live by the rules.

Seems if the Lord really wants a man it doesn't need all that fuss to get him worked up to it. If a man isn't ready for the Lord, then the Lord isn't ready for him, and it's a straight-forward proposition between man and God without any wringing of the hands or hell-fire shouting.

In his study there was an atlas, and he could open it to maps of any land on earth. He could put a finger on Afghanistan, or point out where the Mitanni had lived, or to the site of Babylon, and even to Three Dragon Pass. All that was real. What he did not wish to discover was that between any two numbered pages, 357 and 358 for instance, there were an infinite number of worlds of which he knew nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if anything is ever ended. The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or the memories of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until they touch lives far from ours.

They were men shaped and tempered to the harsh ways of a harsh land, strong in their sense of justice, ruthless in their demand for punishment, relentless in pursuit. From the desert they had carved their homes, and from the desert they drew their courage and their code, and the desert knows no mercy.

The Lord had my trust, yet of others I was not so sure.