Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

• It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
• There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.
• A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
• What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back,-with a hinge in it.
• Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.
• The toad, without which no garden would be complete.
• Politics makes strange bedfellows.
• What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!
• Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments.
• The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.
• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
• Goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire.
• 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.
• I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.
• 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.
• People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.
• Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
• There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.
• We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.
• My Summer in a Garden (1870), Project Gutenberg

charles dudley warner