Louis L'Amour: Books are the perfect Time Machine

QUOTES 

Louis Dearborn L’Amour was an American novelist and short-story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels (though he called his work “frontier stories”); however, he also wrote historical fiction (The Walking Drum), science fiction (Haunted Mesa), non-fiction (Frontier), as well as poetry and short-story collections. These Louis L’Amour quotes will motivate you.

Louis L’Amour Quotes

1. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
2. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

3. “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” ~ Louis L’Amour

4. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
5. “The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.” ~ Louis L’Amour
6. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
7. “We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.” ~ Louis L’Amour

8. “There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.” ~ Louis L’Amour

9. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
10. “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
11. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour , Louis L’Amour quotes on writing
12. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
13. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
14. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

15. “Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.” ~ Louis L’Amour

16. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
17. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
18. “I am somebody. I am me. And I don’t need anybody to make me somebody.” ~ Louis L’Amour
19. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

20. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

21. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
22. “If you wait for inspiration, you’re not a writer, but a waiter.” ~ Louis L’Amour
23. “Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.” ~ Louis L’Amour
24. “Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.” ~ Louis L’Amour
25. “A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.” ~ Louis L’Amour

26. “Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.” ~ Louis L’Amour

27. “Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.” ~ Louis L’Amour
28. “A ship does not sail with yesterday’s wind.” ~ Louis L’Amour
29. “He never knew when he was whipped … So he never was.” ~ Louis L’Amour
30. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
31. “When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.” ~ Louis L’Amour
32. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

33. “Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.” ~ Louis L’Amour

34. “A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.” ~ Louis L’Amour
35. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
36. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

37. “The saddle is a place for dreaming when there’s hours of trail ahead.” ~ Louis L’Amour

38. “There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.” ~ Louis L’Amour
39. “… we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.” ~ Louis L’Amour
40. “Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth.” ~ Louis L’Amour
41. “One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.” ~ Louis L’Amour
42. “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. Those who are truly wise will never permit such moments to escape.” ~ Louis L’Amour

43. “My future is one I must make myself.” ~ Louis L’Amour

44. “Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it’s hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.” ~ Louis L’Amour
45. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
46. “You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you’re gone.” ~ Louis L’Amour
47. “One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.” ~ Louis L’Amour
48. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

49. “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

50. “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
51. “The way I see it, every time a man gets up in the morning he starts his life over. Sure, the bills are there to pay, and the job is there to do, but you don’t have to stay in a pattern. You can always start over, saddle a fresh horse and take another trail.” ~ Louis L’Amour
52. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

53. “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

54. “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
55. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
56. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
57. “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.” ~ Louis L’Amour

58. “To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say ‘I was a man’.” ~ Louis L’Amour

59. “. . . 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.” ~ Louis L’Amour
60. “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
61. “Living a life is much like climbing mountains-the summits are always further off than you think, but when a man has a goal, he always feels he’s working toward something.” ~ Louis L’Amour

62. “I fear there will be no future for those who do not change.” ~ Louis L’Amour

63. “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.” ~ Louis L’Amour
64. “The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.” ~ Louis L’Amour
65. “Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book, you can, in an instant, be traveling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.” ~ Louis L’Amour