David Quotes

The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.

Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.

The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.

We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow.

Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

Read not the Times, read the Eternities.

What is religion? That which is never spoken.

We are ever dying to one world and being born into another.

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.

To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

Duty is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.

It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.

First, there is the power of the Wind, constantly exerted over the globe... Here is an almost incalculable power at our disposal, yet how trifling the use we make of it.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live.

It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds.

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.

When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.

Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.

Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

Simplicity is the peak of civilization.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild - not tamed and broken by society.

The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.

How often, when we have been nearest each other bodily, have we really been farthest off! Our tongues were the witty foils with which we fenced each other off.