Charles Dickens Quotes (757 Quotes)

It's calm and - what's that word again - critical - no - classical, that's it - it is calm and classical.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Do you spell it with a "V" or a "W"?' inquired the judge. 'That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord'.

Her look at her father, half admiring him and proud of him, half ashamed for him, all devoted and loving, went to his inmost heart.

But the words she spoke of Mrs Harris, lambs could not forgive . . . nor worms forget.

This is a London particular... A fog, miss.

Keep up appearances whatever you do.

A boy's story is the best that is ever told.

I know quite enough of myself, said Bella, with a charming air of being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, and I don't improve upon acquaintance . . .

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, vhen you an't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant.

A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match.

As she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a hundred years hence.

A highly geological home-made cake.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Life is given to us on the definite understanding that we boldly defend it to the last.

I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects.

My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.

Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It shook me in my habit - the habit of nine-tenths of the world - of believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it . . .

He had a sense of his dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity.

It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black.

At Mr Wackford Squeers's Academy, Dotheboys Hall . . . Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, provided with all necessaries, instructed in all languages living and dead.

We cannot have single gentlemen to come into this establishment and sleep like double gentlemen without paying extra for it . . .

Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.

The best sitting room at Manor Farm was a good, long, dark-panelled room with a high chimney-piece, and a capacious chimney, up which you could have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all. At the upper end of the room, seated in a shady bower of holly and evergreens, were the two best fiddlers, and the only harp, in all Muggleton. In all sorts of recesses, and on all kinds of brackets, stood massive old silver candlesticks with four branches each. The carpet was up, the candles burnt bright, the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, and merry voices and light-hearted laughter range through the room.

But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn't read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.

If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is.

Anything that makes a noise is satisfactory to a crowd.

His wardrobe was extensive--very extensive--not strictly classical perhaps, not quite new, nor did it contain any one garment made precisely after the fashion of any age or time, but everything was more or less spangled and what can be prettier than spangles

What a world of gammon and spinnage it is, though, ain't it.

It's my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.

When they were all tired of blind-man's buff, there was a great game at snap-dragon, and when fingers enough were burned with that, and all the raisins were gone, they sat down by the huge fire of blazing lags to a substantial supper, and a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary wash-house copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look, and a jolly sound, that were perfectly irresistible.

Eccentricities of genius.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Grief never mended no broken bones, and as good people's wery scarce, what I says is, make the most on 'em.

When found, make a note of.

It will generally be found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.

I love little childrenand it is not a slight thing when they, who are fresh from God, love us.

Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well--thousands of acres of land--a whole province of France--all France itself--lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hairbreadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

The dew seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves the air to rustle among them with a sweeter music and the sky itself to look more blue and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects.

Being that rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a hint that it might be Better and catches light from any little spot of darkness near her.

I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.

There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. It is done. Nothing can undo it nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

The great commander, who seemed by expression of his visage to be always on the look-out for something in the extremest distance, and to have no ocular knowledge of anything within ten miles, made no reply whatever.

I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it and so I have resolved that I must marry it.

There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories - Ghost Stories, or more shame for us - round the Christmas fire and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it.

Mind and matter, said the lady in the wig, glide swift into the vortex if immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.