Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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