I have a regard for law, although I do not always agree with it. Without law, man becomes a beast.

— Louis L'Amour

I have been nothing ... but there is tomorrow.

— Louis L'Amour

I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him, and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief.

— Louis L'Amour

I'm sorry! I really am! Furthermore, I wanted to get out of this place! Furthermore, I want to live! Furthermore, I want to get away from here and never see it again! Furthermore, I hate everything about it!"" You will hate the next place, too," I said. "What you are you will carry with you.

— Louis L'Amour

Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees.

— Louis L'Amour

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

— Louis L'Amour

It had been my father's way to remove obstructions, to repair washouts in old trails, to leave each trail better than he had found it. "Tread lightly on the paths," he had told me. "Others will come when you have gone." That was how I would remember my father. There was never a place he walked that was not the better for his having passed. For every tree he cut down he planted two.

— Louis L'Amour

It has seemed to me that each year one should pause to take stock of himself, to ask: Where am I going? What am I becoming? What do I wish to do and become? Most people whom I encountered were without purpose, people who had given themselves no goal. The first goal need not be the final one, for a sailing ship sails first by one wind, then another. The point is that it is always going somewhere, proceeding toward a final destination.

— Louis L'Amour

It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.

— Louis L'Amour

It is better to have no emotion when it is work. Do what needs to be done and do it coolly.

— Louis L'Amour