Charles Dudley Warner Quotes - Page 2

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.

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?

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 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.

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

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

The world so quickly adjusts itself after any loss, that the return of the departed would nearly always throw it, even the circle most interested, into confusion.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Isolation breeds conceit.

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

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.

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

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