Quotes from Louis L'Amour

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 make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.

When feeding time comes around, there is nothing a hawk likes better than a nice, fat, peaceful dove.

I do not like violence, but ours is a violent time, and there are some men who understand nothing else.

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.

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

The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.

Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain't good for nothin'. I believe what the old Quaker said, 'Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.

Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.

I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.

No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.

What is today accepted as truth will tomorrow prove to be only amusing.

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 can't 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.

Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.

The one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring.

He might never really do what he said, but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go.

The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.

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.

What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.