"Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen"
About this Quote
The line works because it’s less about travel than about perception. L’Amour, a writer whose brand is movement (horses, trails, hard weather, hard men), flips the expected virtue. Motion isn’t the achievement; awareness is. The subtext is a critique of speed culture before we had the phrase: the idea that progress equals velocity, that the point of a day is to rack up measurable output. In that framework, observation becomes “wasted time,” and the world turns into something you pass through rather than engage.
Context matters. L’Amour wrote mythic American landscapes, but he also knew how easily those landscapes get flattened into backdrop for proving yourself. His sentence presses against the cowboy archetype without rejecting it: you can be tough and still be present. It’s a writer’s ethic disguised as trail talk - the real measure of a life isn’t how far you go, it’s whether you were actually there.
Quote Details
| Topic | Journey |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
L'Amour, Louis. (2026, January 16). Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/too-often-i-would-hear-men-boast-of-the-miles-114221/
Chicago Style
L'Amour, Louis. "Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/too-often-i-would-hear-men-boast-of-the-miles-114221/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/too-often-i-would-hear-men-boast-of-the-miles-114221/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2026.
