David Quotes

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

Being is the great explainer.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

When a man truly commits, the universe will conspire to assure his success.

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Your religion is where your love is.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]

I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them.

Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.

It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish.

It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

Those who work much do not work hard.

It [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life.

I have learned that even the smallest house can be a home.

As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

Truth is always paradoxical.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold.

Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.

The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

We begin to praise when we begin to see a thing needs our assistance.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me.

In ancient days the Pythagoreans were used to change names with each other,--fancying that each would share the virtues they admired in the other.

Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.

I have myself to respect, but to myself I am not amiable; but my friend is my amiableness personified.

Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.

If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,- for that is the seat of sympathy,-he forthwith sets about reforming the world.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.

I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.

It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days.

By one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses.