Charles Pooter Quotes

What's the good of a home, if you are never in it? ~ George Grossmith

(Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern Director of the ACLU in 1966, upon seeing conditions in the Jefferson County jail):

...I knew that [Southern whites] would have annihilated blacks had they been more literate and less useful. In Hitler's Germany armbands identified Jews. Those with black skin could have been annihilated more easily. But they were the labor pool with which to break strikes. They served as the pickers of cotton, the diggers of ditches. They emptied bedpans and cleaned the outhouses of our lives. Uneducated, property-less, disenfranchised, and excluded from justice, except as defendants, they were no threat to whites. While they remained useful and didn't get 'out of line,' their lives were assured, for no matter how worthless lower-class white folks said blacks were, the rich, well born, and able upper-class whites knew that they and black folks were really the only people indispensably required by Our Southern Way of Life. (188) ~ Wayne Greenhaw

What if others suffer shipwreck, yet none that sail with Jesus have ever been stranded yet. ~ Charles Spurgeon

New Year's Eve is like any other eve to me: I drink. ~ Charles Bukowski

Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai B'rith is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish.
If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish. ~ Lenny Bruce

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. ~ Charles Lamb

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another
except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work
one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for. ~ Charles De Lint

Whether I was a genius or not did not so much concern me as the fact that I simply did not want a part of anything. The animal-drive and energy of my fellow man amazed me: that a man could change tires all day long or drive an ice cream truck or run for Congress or cut into a man's guts in surgery or murder, this was all beyond me. I did not want to begin. I still don't. Any day I that I could cheat away from this system of living seemed a good victory for me. ~ Charles Bukowski

Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals. ~ Charles Darwin

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

In order to reach for the stars, you must have both feet planted firmly on the ground. ~ Charles F. Glassman

To die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you. ~ Charles Bukowski

Rowley had thought at first the beast had no name; it had taken him a while to understand that it had a perfectly good, descriptive name to which it was as likely to answer as any other, and that name was Cat. There was something terribly Clem about that. ~ K.J. Charles

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled ~ Charles Bukowski

Brethren, who are we that God should have been so good to us? ~ Charles Spurgeon

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened. ~ Charles Baudelaire

A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance! ~ Charles Lamb

Nice and good are different. Being nice involves immediate actions and immediate consequences - you give water to the thirsty and comfort to the afflicted right here, right now. Being good involves living in the world so that you contribute to the welfare of your fellow human beings. ~ Charles Murray

Lewis Carroll. He was an odd one. Real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Completely denied having anything to do with the Alice books. Daft as a brush. You'd have liked him! ~ Mike Tucker

He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men, will know how things are. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

I have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and that, I hope, I may have done imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come. I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a pale lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared. ~ Charles Dickens

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad. ~ Charles De Secondat

It's all right now, Louisa: it's all right, young Thomas,' said Mr. Bounderby; 'you won't do so any more. I'll answer for it's being all over with father. Well, Louisa, that's worth a kiss, isn't it?'

'You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,' returned Louisa, when she had coldly paused, and slowly walked across the room, and p. 18ungraciously raised her cheek towards him, with her face turned away.

'Always my pet; ain't you, Louisa?' said Mr. Bounderby. 'Good-bye, Louisa!'

He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red. She was still doing this, five minutes afterwards.

'What are you about, Loo?' her brother sulkily remonstrated. 'You'll rub a hole in your face.'

'You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I wouldn't cry! ~ Charles Dickens

We never tire of the friendships we form with books. ~ Charles Dickens

We [with Les Charles] started talking about hotel stories, and we found that a lot of the action was happening in the hotel bar. We actually thought of that while we were in a bar: "Why would anyone ever leave here?" ~ Amy Poehler

Happiness is that single and glorious thing which is the very light and sun of the whole animated universe; and where she is not it were better that nothing should be. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Maybe I should have killed four, five hundred people. Then I would have felt better. Then I would have felt like I really offered society something. ~ Charles Manson

In order to cease our striving, we must transfer our trust away from our own abilities, our own accomplishments, our own strength, and place it on His provision. ~ Charles R. Swindoll

Learning to read music in Braille & play by ear helped me develop a [very] good memory. ~ Ray Charles

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need. ~ Charles Kettering

We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Brought up a Presbyterian, indoctrinated from the Catechism, and being naturally of an inquiring mind, I fell a ready prey to the logic of infidelity, as soon as I began to think for myself. But that which at first threatened to be the utter shipwreck of faith in God and the Bible was, under God's providence, over-ruled for good, and merely wrecked my confidence in human creed and systems of Bible misinterpretations. ~ Charles Taze Russell

Don't be afraid to hear me. Don't shrink from anything I say. I am like one who died young: all my life might have been. ~ Charles Dickens

The telephone is needed for
Emergency purposes only
These people are not
Emergencies, they are
Calamities. ~ Charles Bukowski

Prayer is an art which only the Spirit can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. ~ Charles Spurgeon

When you go into your customary barber shop, you will wait for the man who gives you a little better shave, a little trimmer hair-cut. Business leaders are looking for the same things in their offices that you look for in the barber shop. ~ Charles M. Schwab

Thus terminating the interview, during which both ladies had trembled very much, and been marvellously polite
certain indications that they were within an inch of a very desperate quarrel ... ~ Charles Dickens

Many books have mattered enormously to my life and work. 'David Copperfield' by Charles Dickens would be one of several contenders for 'most influential.' I first read it at 13 and have reread it dozens of times since. ~ Cheryl Mendelson

The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

fighting the enemy is futile when you inhabit a system that has the endless generation of enemies built into it. That is a recipe for endless war. ~ Charles Eisenstein

Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't. A simple enough lesson, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn't ~ Charles Frazier

Science is like society and trade, in resting at bottom upon a basis of faith. There are some things here, too, that we can not prove, otherwise there would be nothing we can prove. Science is busy with the hither-end of things, not the thither-end. It is a mistake to contrast religion and science in this respect, and to think of religion as taking everything for granted, and science as doing only clean work, and having all the loose ends gathered up and tucked in. We never reach the roots of things in science more than in religion. ~ Charles Henry Parkhurst