Charles Dickens Quotes
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Nobody near me here, but rats, and they are fine stealthy secret fellows.
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Miss Mills replied, on general principles, that the Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.
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Now, what I want is, Facts. . . . Facts alone are wanted in life.
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... what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.
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I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.
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We must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and Heaven's pleasure.
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The rich, sweet smell of the hayricks rose to his chamber window; the hundred perfumes of the little flower-garden beneath scented the air around; the deep-green meadows shone in the morning dew that glistened on every leaf as it trembled in the gentle air: and the birds sang as if every sparkling drop were a fountain of inspiration to them.
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We can refute assertions, but who can refute silence?
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"Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing."
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Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope.
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One great blemish in the popular mind of America and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust . . . you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded . . . . Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment.
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'Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.
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Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his chair; no face looking over it. It is certain that no gliding footstep touched the floor, as he lifted up his head, with a start, and spoke. And yet there was no mirror in the room on whose surface his own form could have cast its shadow for a moment; and, Something had passed darkly and gone!
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Mr Jarndyce, and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
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"I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted man.
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Some philosophers tell us that selfishness is at the root of our best loves and affections. Mr. Dombey's young child was, from the beginning, so distinctly important to him as a part of his own greatness, or (which is the same thing) of the greatness of Dombey and Son, that there is no doubt his parental affection might have been easily traced, like many a goodly superstructure of fair fame, to a very low foundation.
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One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind.
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Day was breaking at Plashwater Weir Mill Lock. Stars were yet visible, but there was dull light in the east that was not the light of night. The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water. This earth looked spectral, and so did the pale stars: while the cold eastern glare, expressionless as to heat or colour, with the eye of the firmament quenched, might have been likened to the stare of the dead.
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"I know quite enough of myself," said Bella, with a charming air of being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, "and I don't improve upon acquaintance..."
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"Well," said my aunt, "this is his boy - his son. He would be as like his father as it's possible to be, if he was not so like his mother, too."
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Other sound than the owl's voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.
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But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof.
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One thing about this face was very strange and startling. You could not look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling that it had some extraordinary capacity of expressing terror. It was not on the surface. It was in no one feature that it lingered. You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so. Yet there it always lurked-something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment.
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Do not close your heart against all my efforts to help you.