Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) was an American editor, critic, and essayist. A friend of Mark Twain’s, he is best known today for his collaboration with Twain on the novel The Gilded Age.
Born in Plainfield, Massachusetts, Warner graduated from Hamilton College (1851) and practiced law in Chicago until 1869, then settled as an editor in Hartford. His first mature book, My Summer in a Garden (1870,) a series of essays about his farm, portrayed Washington Irving’s quiet humor and mellow grace. In 1884, he became co-editor of Harper’s Magazine, where his papers on the South, Mexico, and the Great West appeared.
Warner published several books of essays, recollections of his childhood, and travel sketches. He co-wrote the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Mark Twain. Warner also wrote literary criticism, most significantly The Relation of Literature to Life (1896.) His trilogy of novels on the corrupt accumulation and overindulgence of a great fortune is A Little Journey in the World (1889,) The Golden House (1894,) and That Fortune (1899.)
American writer Annie Adams Fields wrote the biography Charles Dudley Warner (1902.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Dudley Warner
To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Simplicity
I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Generosity
Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Memory
The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Taxes, Taxation
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.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Dogs
Politics makes strange bed-fellows.
—Charles Dudley Warner
The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Giving, Gifts, Excellence
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Acceptance, Yin, Reason, Miscellaneous, Try, Progress, Regret, General, Remorse, World, Disappointment, Change
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.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Expectation
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 occasionally, and learns about how far to attempt to spring.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Possibilities, Potential, Being True to Yourself
No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have but 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.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Perspective, Property
We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the ten commandments.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Opinions
Barring some piece of luck I have seen but few men get rich rapidly except by means that would make them writhe to have known in public.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Wealth
The wise man does not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparisons of his friends. His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many qualities.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship
The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is, who find the least fault.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Acceptance
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.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Food, Aspirations
Did a woman ever love who would not give all the years of tasteless serenity for one year, for one month, for one day of uncalculating delirium of love poured out upon the man who returned it.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Love
Hoeing in the garden on a bright, soft May day, when you are not obligated to, is nearly equal to the delight of going trouting.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Gardening
There is no such thing as absolute value in this world. You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Values
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.
—Charles Dudley Warner
It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Realization, Expectations, Acceptance, Realistic Expectations, Awareness
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 theground 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.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Gardens
Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.
—Charles Dudley Warner
Topics: Simplicity, Journeys
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