H.W. Charles Quotes

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

I don't know what makes a good feature story. I've always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.

I'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately.

I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

I didn't have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along.

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

I think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep.

That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.

New York is the true City of Light in any season.

I can become so interested in what I have that I forget the needs of my soul.

God gave these ten laws for our good. He wants us to be our very best and to get the most that is possible our of life.

Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.

Trample not on the ruins of a man.

Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.

A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger.

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.

If thou would'st have me sing and play As once I play'd and sung, First take this time-worn lute away, And bring one freshly strung.

Be not frightened at the hard words "imposition," "imposture;" give and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have, unawares, entertained angels.

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

Since all the maids are good and lovable, from whence come the bad wives?

I could never hate anyone I knew.

Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded.

Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.

What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank.

Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.

No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us.

And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!

Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge.

I have something more to do than to feel.

I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.

All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.