Charles Dickens Quotes
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This reminds me, Godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?
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She's the sort of woman now,' said Mould, . . . 'one would almost feel disposed to bury for nothing: and do it neatly, too!
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What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!
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No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.
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The aphorism "Whatever is, is right," would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
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... As to sleep, you know, I never sleep now. I might be a Watchman, except that I don't get any pay, and he's got nothing on his mind.
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Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.
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"There are strings," said Mr. Tappertit, flourishing his bread-and-cheese knife in the air, "in the human heart that had better not be wibrated..."
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When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the tiger and the devil chained -not shown- yet always ready.
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Tongue; well that's a wery good thing when it an't a woman.
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The last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck.
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My guiding star always is, Get hold of portable property.
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Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.
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Lawyers hold that there are two kinds of particularly bad witnesses--a reluctant witness, and a too-willing witness.
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It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.
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To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
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If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name or any other inscription on her face.
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Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her.
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"You see," said Mr. Toots, "what I wanted in a wife was - in short, was sense. Money, Feeder, I had. Sense I - I had not, particularly."
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"People can't die, along the coast," said Mr. Peggotty, "except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in - not properly born, till flood. He's a going out with the tide. It's ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide."
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The bearings of this observation lays in the application on it.
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May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done us? That we may forgive it.
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Although a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere unit among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him, it by no means follows that he can dispossess himself, with equal facility, of a very strong sense of the importance and magnitude of his cares.
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I could settle down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee.