Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

The toad, without which no garden would be complete.

The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an executive ability that would maintain and manoeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, however, consciously philanthropists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving employment to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before. They enjoy no doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of leadership and the consequence derived from its recognition; but they embark in this enterprise in order that they may have the position and the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material advantages — sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which are the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy equipages and troops of servants; the object being that their wives shall dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the ground; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and — a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our world — that they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk. This life — for this enterprise and its objects are types of a considerable portion of life — is not without its ideal, its hero, its highest expression, its consummate flower. It is expressed in a word which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the word Barnum — for our crude young nation has

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

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

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

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

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

Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

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