Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

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

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

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.

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.

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

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

The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.

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.

The principal value of a garden is not understood. It is not to give the possessors vegetables and fruit (that can be better and cheaper done by the market-gardeners), but to teach him patience and philosophy, and the higher virtues - hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation.

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

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

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

If you do things by the job, you are perpetually driven: the hours are scourges. If you work by the hour, you gently sail on the stream of Time, which is always bearing you on to the haven of Pay, whether you make any effort, or not.

There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own.

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.

If there was any petting to be done ... he chose to do it. Often he would sit looking at me, and then, moved by a delicate affection, come and pull at my coat and sleeve until he could touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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