Charles Dudley Warner
Charles Dudley Warner was an American essayist and novelist.
Sourced
- It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
- Backlog Studies, "Second Study” (1873)
- There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.
- Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada (1889)
- A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.
- Editorial, Hartford Courant (August 27, 1897)
My Summer in a Garden (1870)
- 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.
- Preliminary
- 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.
- Preliminary
- 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.
- Preliminary
- Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
- Preliminary
- What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back,—with a hinge in it.
- Third Week
- Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.
- Ninth Week
- The toad, without which no garden would be complete.
- Thirteenth Week
- Politics makes strange bedfellows.
- Fifteenth Week
- What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!
- Fifteenth Week
- Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments.
- Sixteenth Week
- The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.
- Sixteenth Week
Attributed
- Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
- Also credited to Mark Twain
- 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.