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. Many of his stories were made into films. L’Amour’s books remain popular and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death almost all of his 105 existing works (89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction) were still in print, and he was “one of the world’s most popular writers”. Louis Dearborn L’Amour was born in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1908, the seventh child of Dr. Louis Charles L’Amour and Emily Dearborn L’Amour. He was of French-Canadian ancestry through his father and Irish through his mother. Dr. L’Amour was a large-animal veterinarian, local politician and farm-equipment broker who had arrived in Dakota Territory in 1882.Although the area around Jamestown was mostly farm land, cowboys and livestock often traveled through Jamestown on their way to or from ranches in Montana and the markets to the east. L’Amour played “Cowboys and Indians” in the family barn, which served as his father’s veterinary hospital, and spent much of his free time at the local library, the Alfred E. Dickey Free Library, reading, particularly G. A. Henty, a British author of historical boys’ novels during the late nineteenth century. L’Amour once said, “[Henty’s works] enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn’t have about wars and politics.” May these Louis L’Amour Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “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

2. “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

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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.” Louis L’Amour

10. “We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.” Louis L’Amour

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

12. “A ship does not sail with yesterday’s wind.” Louis L’Amour

13. “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

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

15. “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

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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.” Louis L’Amour

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.” Louis L’Amour

24. “He never knew when he was whipped, So he never was.” Louis L’Amour

25. “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

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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.” Louis L’Amour

33. “When at the typewriter I am no longer where I site but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed.” Louis L’Amour

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

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

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Check Out Louis L’Amour interview and profile (1976):

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