Charles Dickens Quotes
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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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You are in every line I have ever read.
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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.
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Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
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The clouds were flying fast, the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some neighboring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty chimney-cowls and weathercocks, and rushing round and round a confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering in all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this attempted desecration, and to mutter, "Let them rest! Let them rest!
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The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour.
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The receptive attitude enables one mind to fix itself to another as by spiritual grappling-irons. When you see that every word you utter us taken in, and weighed, and measured by your listener, you cannot free yourself from the influence of his presence. You are compelled to have in your thoughts not only the words you utter, but the man to whom they are spoken. You must not only talk, and talk well, but you must talk to him.
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... The sun does not shine upon this fair earth to meet frowning eyes, depend upon it.
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Why then we should drop into poetry.
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He was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset.
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Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.
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Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect.
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'Oh, dear no, miss,' he said. 'This is a London particular.' I had never heard of such a thing. 'A fog, miss,' said the young gentleman. 'Oh, indeed!' said I.
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We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.
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Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?
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Most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.
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Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...
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You should keep dogs-fine animals-sagacious.
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We forge the chains we wear in life.
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My life is one demd horrid grind.
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They don't mind it: its a reg'lar holiday to them - all porter and skittles.
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No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
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Before I go," he said, and paused -- "I may kiss her?" It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, "A life you love.
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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.