Charles Dickens Quotes
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Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage. But all men have to wait for time and tide.
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She was truest to them in the season of trial, as all the quietly loyal and good will always be.
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There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
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Heaped on the floor were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, bartrels of oysters, re-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.
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'I want to know what it says,' he answered, looking steadily in her face. 'The sea Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?'
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There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent, and sincere earnestness.
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Ride on! Ride on over all obstacles and win the race.
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For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.
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What is the odds so long as the fire of soul is kindled at the taper of conwiviality, and the wing of friendship never moults a feather! What is the odds so long as the spirit is expanded by means of rosy wine, and the present moment is the least happiest of our existence!
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On the eve of long voyages or an absence of many years, friends who are tenderly attached will seperate with the usual look, the usual pressure of the hand, planning one final interview for the morrow, while each well knows that it is but a poor feint to save the pain of uttering that one word, and the meeting will never be. Should possibilities be worse to bear than certainties?
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It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning.
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If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
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'She means well,' said Mr Jarndyce, hastily. 'The wind’s in the east.' 'It was in the north, sir, as we came down,' observed Richard. 'My dear Rick,' said Mr Jarndyce, poking the fire, 'I’ll take an oath it’s either in the east, or going to be. I am always conscious of an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing in the east.'
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The last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck.
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His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.
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With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and heavy, thoughts hurried and disordered, he felt as though the light were a reproach, and shrunk involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and hideous thing.
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The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.
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It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.
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There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands.
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My dear young lady, crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims.
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I could not help wondering in my own mind....how it came to pass that our joints of meat were of such extraordinary shapes - and whether our butcher contracted for all the deformed sheep that came into the world; but I kept my reflections to myself.
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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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... Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.
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There is a wisdom of the Head, and … there is a wisdom of the Heart.