Louis L'Amour Men Quotations

Caution always, but when a man acts he should act suddenly and with decision.

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.

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

...Proximity to a noose danger and death ... can make man or woman appreciate things.

Carryin' a gun is a chancy thing. Sooner or later a man is put in a position to use it. And a body has to figure that if somebody packs iron he plans to use it when the time comes; and if he draws it out, he plans to shoot.

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

Being scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighter out of him.

I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered- as a storyteller. A good storyteller.

Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.

I wonder why it is the man who pleads for mercy never gives it.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do

For a man with an education the world is a wide place and the opportunities are many

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.

After a few days, I mused, I would have no trouble. Whoever heard of a revolution of fat men?

I do not like violence, but ours is a violent time, and there are some men who understand nothing else.

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.

Revenge could steal a man's life until there was nothing left but emptiness.

Man needs so little... yet he begins wanting so much.

A man can learn a lot if he listens, and if I didn't learn anything else I was learning how much I didn't know.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

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.

A man in his life may have many teachers, some most unexpected. The question lies with the man himself: Will he learn from them?

The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.

What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.

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.

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.

There's no stopping a man who knows he's in the right and keeps a-coming.

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 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.

No man is lost while he yet lives.

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.

To pursue a man effectively, it is best to begin with his thinking.

No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.

When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.

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.

Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.

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

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.

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'.

There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.

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

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.