Charles Dickens Quotes

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Charles Dickens
She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it.
Charles Dickens
He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.
Charles Dickens
But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
Charles Dickens
What a situation!' cried Miss Squeers; '...What is the reason that men fall in love with me, whether I like it or not, and desert their chosen intendeds for my sake?' 'Because they can't help it, miss,' replied the girl; 'the reason's plain.' (If Miss Squeers were the reason, it was very plain.)
Charles Dickens
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years it was a splendid laugh!
Charles Dickens
I believe that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.
Charles Dickens
It was as true said Mr. Barkus "as taxes is. And nothing is truer than them."
Charles Dickens
Minds like bodies will often fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Charles Dickens
Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.
Charles Dickens
Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many-not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favour of two.
Charles Dickens
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.
Charles Dickens
Time is the greatest and longest-established spinner of all. ... His factory is a secret place his work noiseless and his hands are mutes.
Charles Dickens
Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many-not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favour of two.
Charles Dickens
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.
Charles Dickens
Time is the greatest and longest-established spinner of all. ... His factory is a secret place his work noiseless and his hands are mutes.
Charles Dickens
It's over and can't be helped and that's one consolation as they always say in Turkey when they cut the wrong man's head off.
Charles Dickens
One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind.
Charles Dickens
If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers.
Charles Dickens
If the law supposes that said Mr. Bumble "the law is a ass a idiot."
Charles Dickens
This is a world of action and not for moping and droning in.
Charles Dickens
Once a gentleman always a gentleman.
Charles Dickens
Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
He has gone to the demnition bow-wows.
Charles Dickens
I have known him (Micawber) come home to supper with a flood of tears and a declaration that nothing was now left but a jail and go to bed making a calculation of the expense of putting bow-windows to the house "in case anything turned up " which was his favorite expression.
Charles Dickens
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week if there is anything to be got by it.
Charles Dickens
It is a far far better thing that I do than anything I have ever done it is a far far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
Charles Dickens
God bless us every one.
Charles Dickens
We'll start to forget a place once we left it
Charles Dickens
I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.
Charles Dickens
There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
Charles Dickens
Come out into the world about you, be it either wide or limited. Sympathize, not in thought only, but in action, with all about you. Make yourself known and felt for something that would be loved and missed, in twenty thousand little ways, if you were to die; then your life will be a happy one, believe me.
Charles Dickens
I never heerd...nor read of nor see in picters, any angel in tights and gaiters...but...he's a reg'lar thoroughbred angel for all that.
Charles Dickens
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Charles Dickens
I should like to ask you:-Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother's knee, seem days of very long ago?"Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:"Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by my many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me." "I understand the feeling!" exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush. "And you are the better for it?""I hope so.
Charles Dickens
All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it.
Charles Dickens
Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine.
Charles Dickens
My dear Copperfield,” he replied. “To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail which they involve. Even in our professional correspondence,” said Mr. Micawber, glancing at some letters he was writing, “the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression. Still, it is a great pursuit! A great pursuit!
Charles Dickens
Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.
Charles Dickens
There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, acquire peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.
Charles Dickens
Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights: some, so remote from this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their rays have been yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black.
Charles Dickens
Oh! if, when we oppress and grind our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in imagination, the deep testimony of the dead men's voices, which no power can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and injustice: the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong: that each day's life brings with it!
Charles Dickens
Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business.
Charles Dickens
Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first [met you]. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since,—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.
Charles Dickens
what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.
Charles Dickens
The broken heart. You think you will die, but you keep living, day after day after terrible day.
Charles Dickens
I have broken where I should have bent; and have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all God's great creation. The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother. I have turned from the world, and I pay the penalty.
Charles Dickens
Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine, which lay stretched out beyond. The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.
Charles Dickens
He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him.~ Stephen speaking of Rachael
Charles Dickens
I recollect it was settled by general consent that India was quite a misrepresented country, and had nothing objectionable in it, but a tiger or two, and a little heat in the warm part of the day.
Charles Dickens
There are strings in the human heart which must never be sounded by another, and drinks that I make myself are those strings in mine.
Charles Dickens
Aye, though he loved her from his soul with such a self denying love as woman seldom wins; he spoke from first to last of Martin.
Charles Dickens
In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respe
Charles Dickens
the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had never given, and would never take away.
Charles Dickens
He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.
Charles Dickens
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
Charles Dickens
I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
Charles Dickens
Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.
Charles Dickens