Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Charles Dickens

152. “The flowers that sleep by night, opened their gentle eyes and turned them to the day. The light, creation’s mind, was everywhere, and all things owned its power.”

— Charles Dickens

153. “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

154. “Grief never mended no broken bones.”

— Charles Dickens

155. “Now, what I want is Facts.”

— Charles Dickens

156. “She writhes under her life. A woman more angry, passionate, reckless, and revengeful never lived.”

— Charles Dickens

157. “Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it’s blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.”

— Charles Dickens

158. “Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.”

— Charles Dickens

159. “For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.”

— Charles Dickens

160. “I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”

— Charles Dickens

161. “I find the nights long, for I sleep but little, and think much.”

— Charles Dickens

162. “Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?”

— Charles Dickens

163. “There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”

— Charles Dickens

164. “The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you.”

— Charles Dickens

165. “You are in every line I have ever read.”

— Charles Dickens

166. “Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.”

— Charles Dickens

167. “Please, sir, I want some more.”

— Charles Dickens

168. “Some people are nobody’s enemies but their own.”

— Charles Dickens

169. “Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”

— Charles Dickens

170. “Come in, – come in! and know me better, man! I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! You have never seen the like of me before!”

— Charles Dickens

171. “I feel an earnest and humble desire, and shall do till I die, to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness.”

— Charles Dickens

172. “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

— Charles Dickens

173. “Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine.”

— Charles Dickens

174. “We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”

— Charles Dickens

175. “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.”

— Charles Dickens

176. “Man cannot really improve himself without improving others.”

— Charles Dickens

177. “And so, as Tiny Tim said, ‘A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!”

— Charles Dickens

178. “Such is hope, heaven’s own gift to struggling mortals, pervading, like some subtle essence from the skies, all things both good and bad.”

— Charles Dickens

179. “A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage more so.”

— Charles Dickens

180. “We must scrunch or be scrunched.”

— Charles Dickens

181. “If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”

— Charles Dickens

182. “Quadruped lions are said to be savage, only when they are hungry; biped lions are rarely sulky longer than when their appetite for distinction remains unappeased.”

— Charles Dickens

183. “Then I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.”

— Charles Dickens

184. “Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman.”

— Charles Dickens

185. “Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.”

— Charles Dickens

186. “Don’t you think that any secret course is an unworthy one?”

— Charles Dickens

187. “For your popular rumour, unlike the rolling stone of the proverb, is one which gathers a deal of moss in its wanderings up and down.”

— Charles Dickens

188. “Poverty and oysters always seem to go together.”

— Charles Dickens

189. “Accidentally consumed five biscuits when I wasn’t paying attention. Those biscuits are wily fellows – they leap in like sugary ninjas.”

— Charles Dickens

190. “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

— Charles Dickens

191. “The word of a gentleman is as good as his bond; and sometimes better.”

— Charles Dickens

192. “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

193. “It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”

— Charles Dickens

194. “In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”

— Charles Dickens

195. “Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.”

— Charles Dickens

196. “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”

— Charles Dickens

197. “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

198. “I am light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy.”

— Charles Dickens

199. “I cannot help it; reason has nothing to do with it; I love her against reason-but who would as soon love me for my own sake, as she would love the beggar at the corner.”

— Charles Dickens

200. “What are the odds so long as the fire of the soul is kindled at the taper of conviviality, and the wing of friendship never molts a feather?”

— Charles Dickens