Al David Quotes

For things to change, we must change.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.

The mason asks but a narrow shelf to spring his brick from; man requires only an infinitely narrower one to spring his arch of faith from.

I love the broad margin to my life.

What wisdom, what warning can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong that a little gladness may not transgress.

Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.

It is the man determines what is said, not the words.

We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

We must take root; send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

Life is grand, and so are its environments of Past and Future. Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?

If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

All that man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love-to sing, and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.

Love does not analyze its object.

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.

On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.

The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

Only the defeated and deserters go to war.

After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.

He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.

There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.

The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good.

The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand.

I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.

Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.

Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.

Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.