Louis LAmour Quotes

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

When I die, remember that what you knew of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the man. Remember the father.

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.

Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.

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

We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.

There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

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

Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.

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.

There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles -famine, disease and such-like -and some folks are born with money, some with none. In the end it is up to the man what he becomes, and none of those other things matters. It is character that counts.

You are your own best teacher. My advice is to question all things. Seek for answers, and when you find what seems to be an answer, question that, too.

If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Power not only corrupts he who wields the power but those who submit to it. Those who grovel at the feet of power betray their fellows to hide themselves behind the cloak of submission. It is an evil thing.

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.

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.

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.

Any man can shoot a gun, and with practice he can draw fast and shoot accurately, but that makes no difference. What counts is how you stand up when somebody is shooting back at you.

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

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.

We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.

There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.

The thieves and killers are goin' to have guns, so if the honest men don't have 'em they just make it easier for the vicious.

A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind.