Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “There might be some credit in being jolly.”

— Charles Dickens

452. “Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.”

— Charles Dickens

453. “Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop, but don’t tell me.”

— Charles Dickens

454. “I never had one hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.”

— Charles Dickens

455. “Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

— Charles Dickens

456. “Did it ever strike you on such a morning as this that drowning would be happiness and peace?”

— Charles Dickens

457. “There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none.”

— Charles Dickens

458. “In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.”

— Charles Dickens

459. “Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea.”

— Charles Dickens

460. “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.”

— Charles Dickens

461. “Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.”

— Charles Dickens

462. “As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any covering of the body, so the paleness which his situation engendered came through the brown upon his cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the sun.”

— Charles Dickens

463. “Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.”

— Charles Dickens

464. “The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction.”

— Charles Dickens

465. “When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.”

— Charles Dickens

466. “There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent, and sincere earnestness.”

— Charles Dickens

467. “To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering.”

— Charles Dickens

468. “Mr Lorry asks the witness questions: Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord.”

— Charles Dickens

469. “Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain’t so easy for ’em to see out of a needle’s eye.”

— Charles Dickens

470. “Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o’er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.”

— Charles Dickens

471. “I admire machinery as much is any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true.”

— Charles Dickens

472. “When I speak of home, I speak of the place where in default of a better – those I love are gathered together; and if that place where a gypsy’s tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding.”

— Charles Dickens

473. “The sergeant was describing a military life. It was all drinking, he said, except that there were frequent intervals of eating and love making.”

— Charles Dickens

474. “How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose. I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.”

— Charles Dickens

475. “A man in public life expects to be sneered at – it is the fault of his elevated situation, and not of himself.”

— Charles Dickens

476. “Battledore and shuttlecock’s a wery good game, vhen you an’t the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant.”

— Charles Dickens

477. “Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.”

— Charles Dickens

478. “The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.”

— Charles Dickens

479. “Heaven suits the back to the burden.”

— Charles Dickens

480. “May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?”

— Charles Dickens

481. “If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when the business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay.”

— Charles Dickens

482. “There are many things which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited.”

— Charles Dickens

483. “Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good.”

— Charles Dickens

484. “A contented spirit is the sweetness of existence.”

— Charles Dickens

485. “My life is one demd horrid grind.”

— Charles Dickens

486. “My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.”

— Charles Dickens

487. “The “sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine,” was hardly known to him, or to the generality of people, by name.”

— Charles Dickens

488. “An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to its moaning music.”

— Charles Dickens

489. “It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by.”

— Charles Dickens

490. “Christmas may not bring a single thing; still, it gives me a song to sing.”

— Charles Dickens

491. “Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.”

— Charles Dickens

492. “But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble’s soul; his heart was waterproof.”

— Charles Dickens

493. “O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I see you again, with your muscular blacksmith’s arm before your eyes, and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm, as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel’s wing!”

— Charles Dickens

494. “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.”

— Charles Dickens

495. “Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then.”

— Charles Dickens

496. “So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star.”

— Charles Dickens

497. “It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.”

— Charles Dickens

498. “The universe, he observed, makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”

— Charles Dickens

499. “The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far we are pursued by nothing else.”

— Charles Dickens

500. “Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its death-shock.”

— Charles Dickens