Sourced

• 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 (August 27, 1897)

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

Attributed

• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
  • Also credited to Mark Twain

• Goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.