The Lonesome Gods Quotes

“When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“. . . 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, The Lonesome Gods

“I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Knowledge is awareness, and to it there 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 in the wind, something seen in the stars, something that calls from the wasteland to the spirit.
To receive the message, the mental pores must be open. And we white men in striving for our success, in seeking to build a new world from what lies around us, sometimes forget that there are other ways, sometimes forget the Lonesome Gods of the far places, the gods who live on the empty sea, who dance with the dust devils and who wait quietly in the shadows under the cliffs where ancient men once marked their passing with hands.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“I can't tell you how much I don't care.”
― LAmour Louis, The Lonesome Gods

“he who ceases to learn is already a half-dead man.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“he who ceases to learn is already a half-dead man. And do not be like an oyster who rests on the sea bottom waiting for the good things to come by. Search for them, find them.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Actually," he said one morning, "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 an education."

"What you receive is like the outlines in a child's coloring book. You must fill in all the colors yourself.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“You will remember that we won our freedom because we were armed. We were not a simple peasantry unused to weapons. The men who wrote our Constitution knew our people would be safe as long as they were armed.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“There is no greater role for a man to play than to assist in the government of a people, nor anyone lower than he who misuses that power.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“At another time she had said, “Do not be afraid. A little fear can make one cautious. Too much fear can rob you of initiative. Respect fear, but use it for an incentive, do not let it bind you or tie you down.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“One does not need education to be intelligent, and these men might be short on what educated men use in the way of information, but their wits were sharp, their minds were alert, they were prepared to move, to change, to adapt at the slightest need. “All about them were conditions and circumstances to which they must adjust, attack by Indians or outlaw trappers was an ever-present danger, they lived on the very knife-edge of reality, and when this is so, the mind becomes a beautifully tuned instrument.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Men have passed on the knowledge of how to mix cement, lay brick, splice a line, navigate a ship, make steel, and dozens of other crafts, yet in politics, statecraft, and social relationships we continue to repeat old mistakes.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Never did a tree fall that I did not feel a pang, and rightly so, for when the trees are gone, man will also be gone, for without them we cannot live. The very air we breathe comes from trees, and when they are gone, the air will thicken and men will die and our great towers of stone will fall away to rubble and there will be only weeds, and then grass to cover the unsightly mounds we leave behind.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Remember this, my son: our world is one where the impossible occurs every day, and what we often call supernatural is simply the misunderstood.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Keep an open mind,” he told me, “for no man can say what can or cannot be, nor can he say what does or does not exist.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“I’ve learned a little, but I know there is so much more. My father always said that was the wonderful thing about learning, that there was no end to it.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“One cannot begin too young nor linger too long with learning.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“It is all very well to say that man is only a casual whim in a mindless universe, that he, too, will pass. We understand that, but disregard it, as we must. Man to himself is the All, the sum and the total. However much he may seem a fragment, a chance object, a bit of flotsam on the waves of time, he is to himself the beginning and the end. And this is just. This is how it must be for him to survive.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods: An Epic Novel of the California Desert

“We are nothing until we make ourselves something.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Those who pursued me were dead, and some future traveler could mark their trail by their whitening bones and the sound of a desert wind moaning in their empty rib cages.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“He told me once that happiness was born a twin, that it must be shared. He”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“They did not see me sitting on a rock near the water, but the air was clear and I heard their voices, and I looked into the water and wished my father would live forever.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Knowledge is awareness, and to it there 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 wastelands to the spirit. To receive the message, the mental pores must be open, and we white men in striving for our success, in seeking to build a new world from what lies about us, sometimes forget there are other ways, sometimes forget the Lonesome Gods of the far places, the gods who live on the empty sea, who dance with the dust devils and who wait quietly in the shadows under the cliffs where ancient men have marked their passing with hands.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

“Knowledge is awareness, and to it there 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 wastelands to the spirit.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods