Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

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

43 quotes

1. It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

2. There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

3. A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.

8. What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back,-with a hinge in it.

9. Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.

10. The toad, without which no garden would be complete.

11. Politics makes strange bedfellows.

12. What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!

13. Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments.

14. The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

15. Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

16. Goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire.

17. 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.

18. I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.

19. 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.

20. People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.

21. Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

22. There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.

23. We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.

24. My Summer in a Garden (1870), Project Gutenberg

25. The wise man does not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparisons of his friends. His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many qualities.

26. There are those who say that trees shade the garden too much, and interfere with the growth of the vegetables. There may be something in this:but when I go down the potato rows, the rays of the sun glancing upon my shining blade, the sweat pouring down my face, I should be grateful for shade.

27. The onion and its satin wrappings is among the most beautiful of vegetables and is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can be said to have a soul.

28. Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.

29. Snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things.

30. Politics make strange bedfellows.

31. The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest.

32. I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden... name things as I find them.

33. A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.

34. The world is full of poetry as the earth is of pay-dirt; one only needs to know how to strike it.

35. In onion is strength; and a garden without it lacks flavour. The onion, in its satin wrappings, is among the most beautiful of vegetables; and it is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can almost be said to have a soul.

36. Hoe while it is spring, and enjoy the best anticipations. It is not much matter if things do not turn out well.

37. Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.

38. It is well known that no person who regards his reputation will ever kill a trout with anything but a fly. It requires some training on the part of the trout to take to this method.

39. It is difficult to be emphatic when no one is emphatic on the other side.

40. One discovers a friend by chance, and cannot but feel regret that 20 or 30 years of life may have been spent without the least knowledge of him.

41. Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue.

42. Women are not as sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature, being less poetical, and having less imagination; they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make fewer failures in business.

43. There is no such thing as absolute value in this world. You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you.