Charles Dudley Warner (September 12, 1829 – October 20, 1900) was an American essayist and novelist.

Quotes

  • 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 (27 August 1897); this remark was reportedly quoted by Mark Twain and it has become often attributed to him, but the context of the statement might indicate the contrary situation
    • Variant: Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
    • Paraphrased variant: Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

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

References

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