Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

208. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

211. “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

212. “Are there no prisons?”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

215. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

221. “Grief never mended no broken bones.”

— Charles Dickens

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

237. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

240. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

242. “So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

244. “With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and heavy, thoughts hurried and disordered, he felt as though the light were a reproach, and shrunk involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and hideous thing.”

— Charles Dickens

245. “There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas.”

— Charles Dickens

246. “The ocean asks for nothing but those who stand by her shores gradually attune themselves to her rhythm.”

— Charles Dickens

247. “You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

250. “Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you.”

— Charles Dickens