Louis LAmour Quotes - Page 3

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on

The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.

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.

Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.

Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.

Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You went where something might be found and you found something, simple as that.

I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.

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.

. . . What do you wish to be? What would you like to become?” I did not know, and I told her so, but the question worried me. Should I know? “There is time,” she said, “but the sooner you know, the sooner you can plan. To have a goal is the important thing, and to work toward it. Then, if you decide you wish to do something different, you will at least have been moving, you will have been going somewhere, you will have been learning.

A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.

A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.

The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

When corruption is visited upon the cities of men, the mountains and the deserts await him. The cities are for money but the high-up hills are purely for the soul.

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Sometimes we have the dream but we are not ourselves ready for the dream. We have to grow to meet it.

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

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.

The fact of the matter is that poor men do not often steal, and when they do, it is petty theft, something to eat or perhaps an item of clothing to keep them from the cold. Thieves are usually those who have something and want more.

A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything.

violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.

I have been nothing, but there is tomorrow.

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.

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

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