Charles Dickens Quotes

The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned — would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.

~ Charles Dickens

He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up; what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.

~ Charles Dickens

The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him.

~ Charles Dickens

She led me to believe we will going fast because her thoughts were going fast.

~ Charles Dickens

It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain.

~ Charles Dickens

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of

~ Charles Dickens

There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

~ Charles Dickens

It was considered at the time a striking proof of virtue in the young king that he was sorry for his father's death;but, as common subjects have that virtue too, sometimes, we will say no more about it.

~ Charles Dickens

I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.

~ Charles Dickens

...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when we would; starting our fancy away from our Christmas Tree!

~ Charles Dickens

How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? Said louisa as she touched her heart.

~ Charles Dickens

Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain.

~ Charles Dickens

Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief itself arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain

~ Charles Dickens

They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.

~ Charles Dickens

It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities that she has, and not by the qualities she may not have.

~ Charles Dickens

If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitous man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may-no matter how generous and good his nature- one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so.

~ Charles Dickens

I assumed my first undivided responsibility.

~ Charles Dickens

It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed at home.

~ Charles Dickens

[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay.

~ Charles Dickens

Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.

~ Charles Dickens

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

~ Charles Dickens

I must do something or I shall wear my heart away...

~ Charles Dickens

A new heart for a New Year, always!

~ Charles Dickens

Old Barley might be as old as thee hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to overflowing.

~ Charles Dickens

. . . in seclusion, 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 . . .

~ Charles Dickens

You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” said Miss Pross, in her breathing. “Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.

~ Charles Dickens

I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.

~ Charles Dickens

A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.

~ Charles Dickens

The mental agony I have suffered, during the last two days, wrings from me the avowal to you of a passion which, as you well know, is not one of yesterday, nor one I have lightly formed. On Rose, sweet, gentle girl! my heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind. Mother, think better of this, and of me, and do not disregard the happiness of which you seem to think so little.

~ Charles Dickens

Give me a moment, because I like to cry for joy. It's so delicious, John dear, to cry for joy.

~ Charles Dickens

and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.

~ Charles Dickens

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when the Great Creator was a child himself.

~ Charles Dickens

My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.

~ Charles Dickens

. . . for not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent's love.

~ Charles Dickens

Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.

~ Charles Dickens

The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.

~ Charles Dickens

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues — faith and hope.

~ Charles Dickens

Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?

~ Charles Dickens

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.

~ Charles Dickens

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects, and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us

~ Charles Dickens