Charles Dudley Warren

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

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.

I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.

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.

No one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.  

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.

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.

People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.

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

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.

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

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.

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.

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.

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 was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

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.