Edward Dahlberg quotes

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born. (Edward Dahlberg)
When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.
Edward Dahlberg
Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.
Edward Dahlberg
A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
Edward Dahlberg
The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.
Edward Dahlberg
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
Edward Dahlberg
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.
Edward Dahlberg
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
Edward Dahlberg
Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg
The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent. (Edward Dahlberg)
To write is a humiliation.
Edward Dahlberg
The Americans have always been food, sex, and spirit revivalists.
Edward Dahlberg
We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.
Edward Dahlberg
Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Edward Dahlberg
We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
Edward Dahlberg
Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg
Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
Edward Dahlberg
The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
Edward Dahlberg
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Edward Dahlberg
No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American. (Edward Dahlberg)
The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.
Edward Dahlberg
I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
Edward Dahlberg
No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.
Edward Dahlberg
It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
Edward Dahlberg