Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

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.

To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world.

Each age has its choice of the death it will die.

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

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

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

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that today is like yesterday, but he believes tomorrow will be different.

There is but one pleasure in life equal to that of being called on to make an after-dinner speech, and that is not being called on to make one.

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

A cynic might suggest as the motto of modern life this simple legend-just as good as the real.

Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the ten commandments.

People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.

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

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

A woman set on anything will walk right through the moral crockery without wincing.

Nothing shows one who his friends are like prosperity and ripe fruit.

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

There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and also when it is stirred up goes into the man who stirs it.

Politics make strange bedfellows.

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

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.

Hoeing in the garden on a bright, soft May day, when you are not obligated to, is nearly equal to the delight of going trouting.

Perhaps nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do; but nearly every one who tries his power touches the walls of his being.

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

How many wars have been caused by fits of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love of woman than by the hate of man.

The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is who find the least fault.

It is only the fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.

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

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

I know that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don't know what success is.

A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it.

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

There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.

Nature is, in fact, a suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven.

Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which continually destroys and recreates.

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

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

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

The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its
value.

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

Blessed be agriculture! if one does not have too much of it.

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

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.

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

Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable.

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.

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

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.

The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating of all.

The stranger who receives the rare gift of human kindness holds its value in his heart forever.

The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.

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

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

A boy has a natural genius for combining business with pleasure.

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