Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

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

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch, their renewal of life, this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

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

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points. And this is the test of any piece of literature — its universal appeal to human nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh laws — only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and Virginia — the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them.

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

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.

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