Louis Dearborn L'Amour / Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion. If you're stirred by the words below, read more inspiring author quotes.

Louis L'Amour, born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22, 1908, was one of America's most beloved and prolific authors. Over the course of his life he would write over 100 novels and 250 short stories, many of which are still in print today with millions of copies sold worldwide.

His popularity was due, in part, to the resonant themes of his work -- what he called "frontier stories" regardless of the genre they were officially placed in -- which struck a perfect chord of nostalgia, adventure, and discovery.

Beyond that, L'Amour was a reader's writer. He spoke often of his adoration of reading and how he was deeply influenced by the stories of his youth, both those found at his local library and those passed down by his grandfather. That admiration of reading shone through in his books and characters and even more so in the memoir he completed at the end of his life, Education of a Wandering Man. In it, he reflected on the combination of reading and experiential learning -- he spent the majority of his youth and twenties moving around the country before settling down to write full time -- that formed the foundations of his education. He touches on everything from formal education to personal accountability, but what stands out most is his unadulterated love of reading and learning that so shaped him.

Now on the 107th anniversary of his birth, we've pulled together some of his greatest words on reading, writing, and thinking, to hopefully inspire you to read and live by the excellent example he's set.

1. "Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you." (Matagorda: The First Fast Draw, 1974)

2. "A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think." (The Walking Drum, 1984)

3. "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 chances to select from some pretty elegant furnishings." (Bendigo Shafter, 1979)

4. "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." (Education of a Wandering Man, 1989)

5. "We needed books, we needed something on which to build dreams." (Ride the River, 1983)

6. "Reading without thinking is nothing." (The Walking Drum, 1984)

7. "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." (Education of a Wandering Man, 1989)

8. "Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever." (The Walking Drum, 1984)

9. "Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence." (The Haunted Mesa, 1987)

10. "It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. 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." (Education of a Wandering Man, 1989)

11. "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." (Education of a Wandering Man, 1989)