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.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Bad Times, Acceptance
My future is one I must make myself.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence
A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he’s never been any place or done anything.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Fear
The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me and nothing before me but hope.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Hope
Hate would destroy him who hated.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Hatred, Forgiveness
Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and the movements and changes in the world around him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, ‘This I am today; that I will be tomorrow.’ The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Self-Discovery, Attitude, Self-reliance, Confidence, Tomorrow, The Future
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.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Men, Acceptance
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.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: The Mind
Victory is won not in miles, but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later win a little more.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: One Step at a Time, Victory, Winning
Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Action
A man can lose sight of everything else when he’s bent on revenge, and it ain’t worth it.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Forgiveness, Revenge
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.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity
He who plants a tree is a servant of God.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Nature
There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Character
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.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Reading
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Acceptance
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Books
One thing we learned. To make a start and keep plugging. When I had fights at school, the little while I went, I just bowed my neck and kept swinging until something hit the dirt. Sometimes it was me, but I always got up.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance
Revenge could steal a man’s life until there was nothing left but emptiness.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Forgiveness, Revenge
A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Worry, Accepting The Worst, Defeat
Man needs so little… yet he begins wanting so much.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Appreciation, Gratitude, Blessings
He never knew when. he was whipped … so he never was.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Endurance, Perseverance, Resolve
Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Honesty
Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before—it takes something from him.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Anger, Forgiveness
There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Change
One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Acceptance
For you and me, today is all we have; tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future
A body shouldn’t heed what might be. He’s got to do with what is.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Acceptance, Realistic Expectations
There was a Texas Ranger one time who said that there’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps a-coming.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Endurance, Resolve, Perseverance
This—this was what made life: a moment of quiet, the water falling in the fountain, the girl’s voice … a moment of captured beauty. He who is truly wise will never permit such moments to escape.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: The Present
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Richard Wright American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- John Updike American Author
- Margaret Mitchell American Novelist
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
- John Irving American Novelist
- John Cheever American Novelist
- George R. R. Martin American Writer
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
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