Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done – done, see you! – under that sky there, every day.”

— Charles Dickens

102. “I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.”

— Charles Dickens

103. “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.”

— Charles Dickens

104. “The coffee was boiling over a charcoal fire, and large slices of bread and butter were piled one upon the other like deals in a lumber yard.”

— Charles Dickens

105. “I am at the moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold.”

— Charles Dickens

106. “There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.”

— Charles Dickens

107. “He did each single thing as if he did nothing else.”

— Charles Dickens

108. “To have a cricket on the hearth is the luckiest thing in all the world!”

— Charles Dickens

109. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”

— Charles Dickens

110. “In love of home, the love of country has its rise.”

— Charles Dickens

111. “There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.”

— Charles Dickens

112. “The cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.”

— Charles Dickens

113. “Change begets change.”

— Charles Dickens

114. “In the majority of cases, conscience is an elastic and very flexible article.”

— Charles Dickens

115. “I find my breath gets short, but it seldom gets longer as a man gets older. I take it as it comes, and make the most of it. That’s the best way, ain’t it?”

— Charles Dickens

116. “Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!”

— Charles Dickens

117. “Many merry Christmases, many happy New Years. Unbroken friendships, great accumulations of cheerful recollections and affections on earth, and heaven for us all.”

— Charles Dickens

118. “Every failure teaches a man something, if he will but learn.”

— Charles Dickens

119. “The world belongs to those who set out to conquer it armed with self confidence and good humour.”

— Charles Dickens

120. “A multitude of people and yet solitude.”

— Charles Dickens

121. “Trifles make the sum of life.”

— Charles Dickens

122. “When you drink of the water, don’t forget the spring from which it flows.”

— Charles Dickens

123. “Oliver Twist has asked for more!”

— Charles Dickens

124. “United metropolitan improved hot muffin and crumpet baking and punctual delivery company.”

— Charles Dickens

125. “Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues – faith and hope.”

— Charles Dickens

126. “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

— Charles Dickens

127. “There wasn’t room to swing a cat there.”

— Charles Dickens

128. “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see triumph.”

— Charles Dickens

129. “There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind Junior.”

— Charles Dickens

130. “They are Man’s and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

— Charles Dickens

131. “Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.”

— Charles Dickens

132. “In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.”

— Charles Dickens

133. “Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.”

— Charles Dickens

134. “And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.”

— Charles Dickens

135. “Reflect upon your present blessings.”

— Charles Dickens

136. “Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.”

— Charles Dickens

137. “The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.”

— Charles Dickens

138. “Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is often easy to get more.”

— Charles Dickens

139. “What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? O yes!”

— Charles Dickens

140. “I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.”

— Charles Dickens

141. “Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.”

— Charles Dickens

142. “Discipline must be maintained.”

— Charles Dickens

143. “But the mere truth won’t do. You must have a lawyer.”

— Charles Dickens

144. “You have been the last dream of my soul.”

— Charles Dickens

145. “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”

— Charles Dickens

146. “Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”

— Charles Dickens

147. “I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.”

— Charles Dickens

148. “Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope.”

— Charles Dickens

149. “There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.”

— Charles Dickens

150. “Without strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is mercy, and whose great attribute is benevolence to all things that breathe, true happiness can never be attained.”

— Charles Dickens