Al David Quotes
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully though I never received one cent for it.
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may Old time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.
Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it bury it unearth it and gnaw it still.
Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
What a man thinks of himself that is what determines or rather indicates his fate.
Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Simplicity simplicity simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify simplify.
I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rain-storms and did my duty faithfully.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imaged he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.
The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
There is one consolation in being sick and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.
The man who goes alone can start today but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
Through the experience of meditation itself, the meditator becomes conscious that the practice of meditation is an end in itself rather than a means towards an end.
David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.