K Kriesel > K's Quotes

“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

“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
― Louis L'Amour

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
― Louis L'Amour

“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, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.”
― Louis L'Amour

“Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.”
― Louis L'Amour

“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

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
― Louis L'Amour, Matagorda/The First Fast Draw: Two Novels in One Volume

“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, Ride the River

“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

“The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.”
― Louis L'Amour

“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

“He never knew when he was whipped ... So he never was.......”
― Louis L'Amour, To the Far Blue Mountains

“Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Haunted Mesa

“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.”
― Louis L'Amour

“If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Man Called Noon

“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

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

“Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long.”
― Louis L'Amour

“No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“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, Sitka

“One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life. ”
― Louis L'Amour, The Californios

“In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. ”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

“Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

“Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

“Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

“Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.”
― Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History