Charles Dudley Warner
A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.Collection: Art
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.Collection: Gardening
There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.Collection: Knowledge
The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Morning
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Family
Politics makes strange bedfellows.Collection: Politics
Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.
People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.
Goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire.
One of the best things in the world to be is a boy; it requires no experience, but needs some practice to be a good one.
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
There is no such thing as absolute value in this world. You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you.
The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.
Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.
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.
I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.
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.
There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own.
There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.
Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the ten commandments.
How many wars have been caused by fits of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love of woman than by the hate of man.
The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its valueCollection: Christmas
To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.Collection: Life
A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it.Collection: Responsibility
There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.Collection: Inspirational
The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there.Collection: Love
Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.Collection: Reading
It is difficult to be emphatic when no one is emphatic on the other side.Collection: Sides
Politics make strange bedfellows.Collection: Strange
To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world.Collection: Fire
There was never a nation that became great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.Collection: World
One of the best things in the world to be is a boy; it requires no experience, but needs some practice to be a good oneCollection: Boys
A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Grateful
The stranger who receives the rare gift of human kindness holds its value in his heart forever.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Leadership
How many wars have been caused by fits of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love of woman than by the hate of man?Collection: War
If there was any petting to be done...he chose to do it. Often he would sit looking at me, and then, moved by a delicate affection, come and pull at my coat and sleeve until he could touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented.Collection: Cat
There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and also when it is stirred up goes into the man who stirs it.Collection: Flower
The world is full of poetry as the earth is of pay-dirt; one only needs to know how to strike it.Collection: Emotional
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.Collection: Friendship
The world so quickly adjusts itself after any loss, that the return of the departed would nearly always throw it, even the circle most interested, into confusion.Collection: Loss
The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.Collection: Men