CHARLES DICKENS QUOTES II
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Wherever religion is resorted to as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull, monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please. They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous; and they who enlarge with the greatest pertinacity on the difficulty of getting into heaven will be considered, by all true believers, certain of going there: though it would be hard to say by what process of reasoning this conclusion is arrived at.
CHARLES DICKENS, American Notes
It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.
CHARLES DICKENS, letter to John Forster, September 29, 1854
Trifles make the sum of life.
CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield
The aim of talk should be like the aim of a flying arrow -- to hit the mark; but to this end there must be a mark to hit, that is, there must be a listener.
CHARLES DICKENS, "The Art of Listening", All the Year Round
Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.
CHARLES DICKENS, Little Dorrit
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS, The Pickwick Papers
Reflect upon your present blessings — of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
CHARLES DICKENS, "Characters," Sketches by Boz
In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
Money and goods are certainly the best of references.
CHARLES DICKENS, Our Mutual Friend
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
CHARLES DICKENS, Our Mutual Friend
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.
CHARLES DICKENS, The Old Curiosity Shop
The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
The talker has found a hearer but not a listener; and though he may talk his very best for his own sake, you will find that his mental movements are erratic: they have no fixed centre and no definite object. His talk is like the water of a canal whose banks have given way, which rolls aimlessly hither and thither, without fulfilling any useful function, though it is the same water which was so helpful and serviceable, when it was confined within clearly marked limits by the restraining force of its earthy boundaries.
CHARLES DICKENS, "The Art of Listening", All the Year Round
The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will.'
CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield
It is no small thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
CHARLES DICKENS, Master Humphrey's Clock
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.
CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House
The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer's morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.
CHARLES DICKENS, Sketches by Boz
The best way to lengthen out our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose.
CHARLES DICKENS, attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs.
CHARLES DICKENS, Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes , which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble as it pleases. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and even if we dream, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two.
CHARLES DICKENS, Oliver Twist
Accepting, then, the years of solitude as perfectly inevitable, one must consider how to pass them, how to keep one's self occupied and amused.
CHARLES DICKENS, Household Words: A Weekly Journal
I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
We do not believe in great stupidity as a common natural gift; doubtless, it sometimes is so; but as seen among grown-up people, it is often artificial.
CHARLES DICKENS, Household Words
Here and there, an old tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie.
CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House
My worst fears are realized--my husband's neglect is occasioned by his love for another.
CHARLES DICKENS, Is She His Wife?
The rain is ever falling, drip, drip, drip, by day and night, upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement.
CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House
Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and stared up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
He didn't at all see why the busy bee should be proposed as a model to him; he supposed the Bee liked to make honey, or he wouldn't do it -- nobody asked him. It was not necessary for the bee to make such a merit of his tastes.
CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House
A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean.
CHARLES DICKENS, Little Dorrit
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.
CHARLES DICKENS, "The Art of Listening", All the Year Round
That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.
CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities
If the parks be "the lungs of London" we wonder what Greenwich Fair is -- a periodical breaking out, we suppose -- a sort of spring rash.
CHARLES DICKENS, Greenwich Fair
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