Charles Dickens Quotes
-
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
-
"Hope to the last!" said Newman, clapping him on the back. "Always hope; that's dear boy. Never leave off hoping; it don't answer. Do you mind me, Nick? it don't answer. Don't leave a stone unturned. It's always something, to know you've done the most you could. But, don't leave off hoping, or it's of no use doing anything. Hope, hope, to the last!"
-
The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.
-
Every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
-
We can refute assertions, but who can refute silence?
-
There is a Sunday conscience as well as a Sunday coat; and those who make religion a secondary concern put the coat and conscience carefully by to put on only once a week.
-
It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been heated in a furnace, and were growing cold.
-
Some people are nobody's enemies but their own.
-
Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
-
My hair stands on end at the cost and charges of these boys. Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father!
-
And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States.
-
A heart well worth winning, and well won. A heart that, once won, goes through fire and water for the winner, and never changes, and is never daunted.
-
"Vell," said Mr. Weller, "Now I s'pose he'll want to call some witnesses to speak to his character, or p'raps to prove a alleybi. I've been a turnin' the bis'ness over in my mind, and he may make his-self easy, Sammy. I've got some friends as'll do either for him, but my adwice 'ud be this here-never mind the character, and stick to the alleybi. Nothing like a alleybi, Sammy, nothing."
-
Can you suppose there's any harm in looking as cheerful and being as cheerful as our poor circumstances will permit?
-
There are hopes, the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description; too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should only be known through the sympathy of hearts.
-
Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.
-
He was by no means opposed to hard labour on principle, for he would work away at a cricket-match by the day together, - running, and catching, and batting, and bowling, and revelling in toil which would exhaust a galley-slave.
-
The ocean asks for nothing but those who stand by her shores gradually attune themselves to her rhythm.
-
Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.
-
Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.
-
Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope.
-
I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
-
For though we are perpetually bragging of it as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper.
-
Champagne is simply one of the elegant extras of life.