Top 50 Edward Dahlberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It takes a long time to understand nothing.”

— Edward Dahlberg

2. “When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.”

— Edward Dahlberg

3. “Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.”

— Edward Dahlberg

4. “Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male.”

— Edward Dahlberg

5. “Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven’s own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter’s field of the newspapers back pages.”

— Edward Dahlberg

6. “Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.”

— Edward Dahlberg

7. “A strong foe is better than a weak friend.”

— Edward Dahlberg

Featured in: Strong Quotes

8. “Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.”

— Edward Dahlberg

9. “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

10. “What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.”

— Edward Dahlberg

11. “Every decision you make is a mistake.”

— Edward Dahlberg

12. “One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness.”

— Edward Dahlberg

13. “I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.”

— Edward Dahlberg

14. “We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.”

— Edward Dahlberg

15. “Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.”

— Edward Dahlberg

16. “To write is a humiliation.”

— Edward Dahlberg

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.”

— Edward Dahlberg

20. “Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.”

— Edward Dahlberg

21. “No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.”

— Edward Dahlberg

22. “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

23. “Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.”

— Edward Dahlberg

24. “We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.”

— Edward Dahlberg

25. “Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.”

— Edward Dahlberg

26. “There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.”

— Edward Dahlberg

27. “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

28. “The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.”

— Edward Dahlberg

29. “The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.”

— Edward Dahlberg

30. “Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.”

— Edward Dahlberg

31. “A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.”

— Edward Dahlberg

32. “We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.”

— Edward Dahlberg

33. “It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.”

— Edward Dahlberg

34. “Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.”

— Edward Dahlberg

35. “We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.”

— Edward Dahlberg

36. “The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.”

— Edward Dahlberg

37. “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

38. “I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can’t smell character unless it stinks.”

— Edward Dahlberg

39. “Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.”

— Edward Dahlberg

40. “The greater part of your misogamy is venal; the other cause of your invective humbug is that you’re a muggish homuncle who couldn’t raise a flickering ember in a vagabond-laced mutton.”

— Edward Dahlberg

41. “One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.”

— Edward Dahlberg

42. “The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts -the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria -are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”

— Edward Dahlberg

43. “Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.”

— Edward Dahlberg

44. “Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.”

— Edward Dahlberg

45. “There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.”

— Edward Dahlberg

46. “What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.”

— Edward Dahlberg

47. “Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.”

— Edward Dahlberg

48. “Who has enough credit in this world to pay for his mistakes?”

— Edward Dahlberg

49. “We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.”

— Edward Dahlberg

50. “The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.”

— Edward Dahlberg