Quotes from Louis L'Amour

A man can lose sight of everything else when he's bent on revenge, and it ain't worth it.

I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered- as a storyteller. A good storyteller.

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 man can learn a lot if he listens, and if I didn't learn anything else I was learning how much I didn't know.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.

There's no stopping a man who knows he's in the right and keeps a-coming.

Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.

No man is lost while he yet lives.

I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.

The deep sea can be fathomed, but who knows the heart of a woman?

Politics is the art of making civilization work.

It is better to have no emotion when it is work. Do what needs to be done and do it coolly.

I am somebody. I am me. I like being me. And I need nobody to make me somebody.

There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man.

I think of myself... as a troubadour, a village storyteller, the guy in the shadows of the campfire.

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.

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

Up to a point a person's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.

The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.

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

I am somebody. I am me. And I don't need anybody to make me somebody.