Louis L'Amour

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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
Collection: Regret
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There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Inspirational
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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
Collection: Life
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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
Collection: Somewhere Else
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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
Collection: Missing
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We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Thinking
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There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Men
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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
Collection: Teacher
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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
Collection: Feet
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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
Collection: Writing
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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
Collection: Doe
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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
Collection: Teacher
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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
Collection: War
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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
Collection: Mistake
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Long ago I learned nothing gets done by just wishing it. You have to do it.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Long Ago
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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
Collection: Love Is
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Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Today
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There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Men
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... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Reading
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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
Collection: Inspirational
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Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Forever
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The saddle is a place for dreaming when there's hours of trail ahead.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Dream
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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
Collection: Eye
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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
Collection: Gun
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A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Wind
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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
Collection: Girl
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One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Talking
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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
Collection: Opportunity
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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
Collection: Men
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If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Inspiration
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A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Book
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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
Collection: Sleep
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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
Collection: Block
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I am somebody. I am me. And I don't need anybody to make me somebody.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Inspirational
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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
Collection: Lonely
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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
Collection: Water
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My future is one I must make myself.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: My Future
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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
Collection: People
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There's no stopping a man who knows he's in the right and keeps a-coming.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Men
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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
Collection: Men
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When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Lonely
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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
Collection: Morning
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Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling 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
Collection: Country
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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
Collection: Gun
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Knowledge is awareness, and to it are many paths, not all of them paved with logic. But sometimes one is guided through the maze by intuition. One is led by something felt on the wind, something seen in the stars, something that calls from the wasteland to the spirit.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Stars
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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
Collection: Firsts
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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
Collection: Book
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. . . 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
Collection: Moving
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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
Collection: Home
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The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
- Louis L'Amour
Collection: Time