Charles Dickens Quotes
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451. “My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

453. “My hair stands on end at the cost and charges of these boys. Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father!”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

457. “Of little worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it were not.”

— Charles Dickens

458. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

460. “Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.”

— Charles Dickens

461. “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

462. “If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name or any other inscription on her face.”

— Charles Dickens

463. “Being that rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a hint that it might be Better and catches light from any little spot of darkness near her.”

— Charles Dickens

464. “I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

466. “From the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has invariably gone one way Charles Darnay’s way the way of the love of a woman.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

469. “She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her ‘Ode to an Expiring Frog,’ sir.”

— Charles Dickens

470. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

475. “All partings foreshadow the great final one.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

477. “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

478. “Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.”

— Charles Dickens

479. “You don’t carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.”

— Charles Dickens

480. “Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started 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;.”

— Charles Dickens

481. “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

482. “When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

484. “Your day is done. Night is coming fast for you.” – Nickolas Nickleby.”

— Charles Dickens

485. “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

486. “This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”

— Charles Dickens

487. “Nothing is discovered without God’s intention and assistance, and I suppose every new knowledge of His works that is conceded to man to be distinctly a revelation by which men are to guide themselves.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

489. “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

490. “You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another time. I have done a similar thing myself, in construction, often. Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn.”

— Charles Dickens

491. “Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years it was a splendid laugh!”

— Charles Dickens

492. “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

493. “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

494. “The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them.”

— Charles Dickens

495. “There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.”

— Charles Dickens

496. “The worst class of sum worked in the every-day world is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as to their own.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

498. “But, in this separation I associate you only with the good and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you have done far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.”

— Charles Dickens

499. “The day was made for laziness, and lying on one’s back in green places, and staring at the sky till its brightness forced one to shut one’s eyes and go to sleep...”

— Charles Dickens

500. “Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within;.”

— Charles Dickens