Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble.
—Louis L’Amour
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
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
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
For you and me, today is all we have; tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: The Future, Tomorrow
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
To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.
—Louis L’Amour
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, Winning, Victory
Some say opportunity knocks only once, That is not true. Opportunity knocks all the time, but you have to be ready for it. If the chance comes, you must have the equipment to take advantage of it.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Opportunity
Few of us ever live in the present, we are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: The Present
One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Acceptance
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Acceptance
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: Confidence, Self-Discovery, Self-reliance, The Future, Attitude, Tomorrow
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
What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Commitment, Dedication
There have always been hard times. There have always been wars and troubles.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Character
He never knew when. he was whipped … so he never was.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance
To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Voting
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Motivation
A man can lose sight of everything else when he’s bent on revenge, and it ain’t worth it.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Revenge, Forgiveness
I fear there will be no future for those who do not change.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: The Future, Future, Tomorrow
Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Contentment
Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Action
Pa, he always said a man had to look spry for himself, because nobody would do it for him; your opportunities didn’t come knocking around, you had to hunt them down and hog-tie them.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Confidence, Success, Self-reliance
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Books
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.
—Louis L’Amour
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Beginnings, The Future, Beginning
He who plants a tree is a servant of God.
—Louis L’Amour
Topics: Nature
Hate clouds the mind. It is better to have no emotion when it is work. Do what needs to be done, and do it coolly.
—Louis L’Amour
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
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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