Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Dudley Warner

People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

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

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

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

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.

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

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.

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

There are those who say that trees shade the garden too much, and interfere with the growth of the vegetables. There may be something in this:but when I go down the potato rows, the rays of the sun glancing upon my shining blade, the sweat pouring down my face, I should be grateful for shade.

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

There is no beauty like that which was spoiled by an accident; no accomplishments and graces are so to be envied as those that circumstances rudely hindered the development of.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The chief effect of talk on any subject is to strengthen one's own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does believe until he is warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and defence.

A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest.

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.

Politics make strange bedfellows.

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

Isolation breeds conceit.

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

In onion is strength; and a garden without it lacks flavour. The onion, in its satin wrappings, is among the most beautiful of vegetables; and it is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can almost be said to have a soul.

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.

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

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.

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