Top 60 Charles Dudley Warner Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

4. “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

5. “What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

7. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

10. “A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

13. “People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

18. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

19. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

20. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

23. “The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

24. “Few people can resist doing what is universally expected of them. This invisible pressure is more difficult to stand against than individual tyranny.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

25. “Isolation breeds conceit.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

27. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

31. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

33. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

34. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

36. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

40. “You want to hate somebody, if you can, just to keep your powers of discrimination bright, and to save yourself from becoming a mere mush of good-nature.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

41. “One of the advantages of pure congregational singing is that you can join in the singing whether you have a voice or not. The disadvantage is that your neighbor can do the same.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

43. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

44. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

48. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

49. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

50. “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.”

— Charles Dudley Warner