Quotes from Charles Dudley Warner

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

The wise man's ... friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many qualities.

It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

No one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.

Discontent, then, arises from absurd notions of equality, from natural conditions of inequality, from false notions of education, and from the very patent fact, in this age, that men have been educated into wants much more rapidly than social conditions have been adjusted, or perhaps ever can be adjusted, to satisfy those wants. Beyond all the actual hardship and suffering, there is an immense mental discontent which has to be reckoned with.

Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our destination sooner—getting there quickly being a supreme object. It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal

This is really life, this is doing something in the world, and in the presence of it you can see why the creators of it regard your world, which seemed to you so important, the world whose business is the evolution and expression of thought and emotion, as insignificant.

And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state, virtue and the virtuous are dishonored. And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is neglected.

In art and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal to the universal in the race.

We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius.

We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power which literature gives them to live outside it.

Semplicità è fare il viaggio di questa vita con solo il bagaglio necessario.

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

Broad acres are a patent of nobility; and 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 4000 miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.