Charles Dudley Warner

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

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

Charles Dudley Warner (September 12, 1829 – October 20, 1900) was an American essayist and novelist.

Quotes

• It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
  • Backlog Studies, "Second Study” (1873).

• There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.
  • Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada (1889).

• A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.
  • Editorial, Hartford Courant (27 August 1897); this remark was reportedly quoted by Mark Twain and it has become often attributed to him, but the context of the statement might indicate the contrary situation
  • Variant: Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
  • Paraphrased variant: Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

My Summer in a Garden (1870)

• 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.
  • Preliminary.

• 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.
  • Preliminary.

• 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.
  • Preliminary.

• Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
  • Preliminary.

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

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

• The toad, without which no garden would be complete.
  • Thirteenth Week.

• Politics makes strange bedfellows.
  • Fifteenth Week.

• What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!
  • Fifteenth Week.

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

• The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.
  • Sixteenth Week.

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

References

• My Summer in a Garden (1870), Project Gutenberg

External links

• Works by Charles Dudley Warner at Project Gutenberg
• 17 Quotes from Charles Dudley Warner at Old-Fashioned-American-Humor.com