Al David Quotes

It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent.

I am never rich in money, and I am never meanly poor.

Be not anxious to avoid poverty. In this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested.

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.

The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.

Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.

When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

Work your vein till it is exhausted, or conducts you to a broader one.

How many fine thoughts has every man had! How few fine thoughts are expressed!

I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.

To see wild life you must go forth at wild season.

To forget all about your mistakes adds to them perhaps.

What have I to do with plows? I cut another furrow than you see.

What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic.

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.

The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?

When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.

Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.

To the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad anddoes me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.

How many a poor immortal soul I have met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it [an oversized home].

I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.

I learned to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.

A peaceful soul haunts the warring mind.

If it's too easy it's probably not love.

The life you make is the life you will have. Your decisions are your blueprint.

There is life or death in words.

Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy.

The Kennedy home was a place of much action and laughter, a lively, brawling mob of children overseen by a mother who knew when to look the other way.

As you get older your willingness to tell more of the truth is awakened and you don't have to think about it or imagine it because now you know this to be true.

As actors we're always trying to use our creative imagination.

My whole life, I always wanted to be an actor.

Actually, I wanted to be an actor when I was two years old.

I came out singing, the doctor slapped me on the head, and I started singing.

It is beyond ridiculous that wolves need to study a human or that they are capable of it.

Pretty good. Pretttttttty, pretttttttttty, pretttttty good.

I think golf is literally an addiction. I'm surprised there's not Golf Anonymous.

Luck always plays a part for everyone, whether they want to admit it or not. I was very lucky, and I know it.

Whenever something good happens to me, it's usually followed by something terrible.

I'd like to start a family, but you have to have a date first.

I tell people that I've now done one decent thing in my life. Albeit inadvertently.

Well, after the divorce, I went home and turned all the lights on!