Al David Quotes

A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.

The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.

Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.

In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.

Shall a man not have his spring as well as the plants?

If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.

The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,-one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.

Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.

If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law.

The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.

Those undeserved joys which come uncalled and make us more pleased than grateful are they that sing.

Man is but the place where I stand.

Man's moral nature is a riddle which only eternity can solve.

Count your age with friends but not with years.

This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.

The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.

The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do; and yet how much is not done by us!

If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.

Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.

We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.

The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.

The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine.

Heal yourselves, doctors; by God I live.

Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

In the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, I fear, men never attain to.

In my cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n't my business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much its business to be seeking me.

One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man.

Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.

The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.

Let the beautiful laws prevail. Let us not weary ourselves by resisting them.

In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only.

Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged.

The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.

It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.

Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.

There is no history of how bad became better.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.