Charles Dickens Quotes
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Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.
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There is nothing--no, nothing--innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in the cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those that loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deep sea.
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You should keep dogs-fine animals-sagacious.
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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.
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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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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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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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...and tomorrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it
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To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things - but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.
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Discipline must be maintained.
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You can't make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn't do it when your uncle George was living much less when he's dead.
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A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.
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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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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!
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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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'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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. . . 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 . . .
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'Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy,' he says.
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The bearings of this observation lays in the application on it.
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... The sun does not shine upon this fair earth to meet frowning eyes, depend upon 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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It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.
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Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.