Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.”

— Charles Dickens

202. “Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.”

— Charles Dickens

203. “When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the tiger and the devil chained -not shown- yet always ready.”

— Charles Dickens

204. “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

205. “I went away, dear Agnes, loving you. I stayed away, loving you. I returned home, loving you!”

— Charles Dickens

206. “I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disninterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her.”

— Charles Dickens

207. “I hope you care to be recalled to life?”

— Charles Dickens

208. “He was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset.”

— Charles Dickens

209. “I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry – I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart – God knows what its name was – that tears started to my eyes.”

— Charles Dickens

210. “Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.”

— Charles Dickens

211. “I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.”

— Charles Dickens

212. “The sun, – the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man – burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.”

— Charles Dickens

213. “To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.”

— Charles Dickens

214. “The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.”

— Charles Dickens

215. “The New Year, like an Infant Heir to the whole world, was waited for, with welcomes, presents, and rejoicings.”

— Charles Dickens

216. “I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age.”

— Charles Dickens

217. “One should never be ashamed to cry. Tears are rain on the dust of earth.”

— Charles Dickens

218. “Circumstances beyond my individual control.”

— Charles Dickens

219. “We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down, Trot!”

— Charles Dickens

220. “The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.”

— Charles Dickens

221. “Are there no prisons?”

— Charles Dickens

222. “Judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to bring it down one day.”

— Charles Dickens

223. “Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.”

— Charles Dickens

224. “The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard, as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves.”

— Charles Dickens

225. “A heart well worth winning, and well won. A heart that, once won, goes through fire and water for the winner, and never changes, and is never daunted.”

— Charles Dickens

226. “My imagination would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention.”

— Charles Dickens

227. “Friendless I can never be, for all mankind are my kindred, and I am on ill terms with no one member of my great family.”

— Charles Dickens

228. “I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

— Charles Dickens

229. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business! ” – Marley’s Ghost.”

— Charles Dickens

230. “There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection with manner.”

— Charles Dickens

231. “A man ain’t got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views.”

— Charles Dickens

232. “I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.”

— Charles Dickens

233. “He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been, in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away, by the fervour of this reproach.”

— Charles Dickens

234. “It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.”

— Charles Dickens

235. “Besides, the children of the poor know but few pleasures. Even the cheap delights of childhood must be bought and paid for.”

— Charles Dickens

236. “There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.”

— Charles Dickens

237. “To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.”

— Charles Dickens

238. “Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.”

— Charles Dickens

239. “The more especially, as in my juvenile frankness, I took some credit to myself for being so confidential and felt that I was quite the patron of my two respectful entertainers.”

— Charles Dickens

240. “When I have heard him talking to Papa during the sittings for the picture, I have sat wondering whether it could be that he has no belief in anybody else, because he has no belief in himself.”

— Charles Dickens

241. “Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking.”

— Charles Dickens

242. “Champagne is one of the elegant extras in life.”

— Charles Dickens

243. “Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.”

— Charles Dickens

244. “Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage. But all men have to wait for time and tide.”

— Charles Dickens

245. “Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.”

— Charles Dickens

246. “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

247. “Money and goods are certainly the best of references.”

— Charles Dickens

248. “The forces that affect our lives, the influences that mold and shape us, are often like whispers in a different room, teasingly indistinct, apprehended only with difficulty.”

— Charles Dickens

249. “Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.”

— Charles Dickens

250. “Ride on! Ride on over all obstacles and win the race.”

— Charles Dickens