|
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!
CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
CHARLES DICKENS, Hard Times
There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
Grief never mended no broken bones.
CHARLES DICKENS, Sketches by Boz
Train up a fig-tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.
CHARLES DICKENS, Dombey and Son
Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.
CHARLES DICKENS, Oliver Twist
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed.
CHARLES DICKENS, Martin Chuzzlewit
For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?
CHARLES DICKENS, Master Humphrey's Clock
There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.
CHARLES DICKENS, Oliver Twist
If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers.
CHARLES DICKENS, The Old Curiosity Shop
A good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.
CHARLES DICKENS, Pickwick Papers
Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
CHARLES DICKENS, Barnaby Rudge
When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
It is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
Merry Christmas! ... What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented against you? If I would work my will ... every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas," on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on their journeys.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person.
CHARLES DICKENS, Old Curiosity Shop
We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner.
CHARLES DICKENS, Little Dorrit
Throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people we most despise.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
No one is useless in this world ... who lightens the burden of it for any one else.
CHARLES DICKENS, Our Mutual Friend
A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House
Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
CHARLES DICKENS, Oliver Twist
It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.
CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House
Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
CHARLES DICKENS, Master Humphrey's Clock
The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.
CHARLES DICKENS, "Our Parish," Sketches by Boz
My guiding star always is, Get hold of portable property.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
CHARLES DICKENS, Hunted Down
There is a wisdom of the Head, and ... there is a wisdom of the Heart.
CHARLES DICKENS, Hard Times
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
Of all bad listeners, the worst and most terrible to encounter is the man who is so fond of listening that he wishes to hear, not only your conversation, but that of every other person in the room.
CHARLES DICKENS, "The Art of Listening", All the Year Round
Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
CHARLES DICKENS, Dombey and Son
Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.
CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield
The habit of paying compliments kept a man's tongue oiled without any expense.
CHARLES DICKENS, The Old Curiosity Shop
We must scrunch or be scrunched.
CHARLES DICKENS, Our Mutual Friend
The things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.
CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield
It is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
I'll tell you ... what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter -- as I did!
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.
CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield
Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield
Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
CHARLES DICKENS, Our Mutual Friend
The night is like a seaside night in England toward the end of September. They say it is the prelude to clear weather. But the wind is roaring now, and the sea is raving, and the rain is driving down, as if they had all set in for a real hearty picnic, and each had brought its own relations to the general festivity.
CHARLES DICKENS, Letters of Charles Dickens: 1833-1870
The worst of all listeners is the man who does nothing but listen.
CHARLES DICKENS, "The Art of Listening", All the Year Round
|
