Charles Dudley Warner (September 12, 1829 – October 20, 1900) was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is who find the least fault.
The onion and its satin wrappings is among the most beautiful of vegetables and is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can be said to have a soul.
I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden. . . name things as I find them.
There is but one pleasure in life equal to that of being called on to make an after-dinner speech, and that is not being called on to make one.
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.
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.
I know that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don't know what success is.
Goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire.
Perhaps nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do; but nearly every one who tries his power touches the walls of his being.
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.
There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.
To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world.
There are those who say that trees shade the garden too much, and interfere with the growth of the vegetables. There may be something in this:but when I go down the potato rows, the rays of the sun glancing upon my shining blade, the sweat pouring down my face, I should be grateful for shade.
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.
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.
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.
Nothing shows one who his friends are like prosperity and ripe fruit.
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.
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.