24 Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

Charles Dudley Warner offers witty musings on ignorance, mud-pies, and family meals, perfect for readers who enjoy quirky reflections.

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
#1
There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.
#2
A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.
#3
To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch, their renewal of life, this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.
#4
Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it.
#5
No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.
#6
Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
#7
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back,-with a hinge in it.
#8
Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.
#9
The toad, without which no garden would be complete.
#10
Politics makes strange bedfellows.
#11
What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!
#12
Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments.
#13
The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.
#14
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
#15
Goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire.
#16
Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration.
#17
I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.
#18
One of the best things in the world to be is a boy; it requires no experience, but needs some practice to be a good one.
#19
People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.
#20
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
#21
There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.
#22
We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.
#23
My Summer in a Garden (1870), Project Gutenberg
#24

Charles Dudley Warner quotes