Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “I don’t know what day of the month it is!” said Scrooge. “I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop!”

— Charles Dickens

302. “There never was such a goose.”

— Charles Dickens

303. “They are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat.”

— Charles Dickens

304. “Give me a moment, because I like to cry for joy. It’s so delicious, John dear, to cry for joy.”

— Charles Dickens

305. “The plain rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground.”

— Charles Dickens

306. “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

307. “May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done us? That we may forgive it.”

— Charles Dickens

308. “You should keep dogs-fine animals-sagacious.”

— Charles Dickens

309. “The privileges of the side-table included the small prerogatives of sitting next to the toast, and taking two cups of tea to other people’s one.”

— Charles Dickens

310. “It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott.”

— Charles Dickens

311. “Oh God! To hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust !”

— Charles Dickens

312. “The wine-shops breed, in physical atmosphere of malaria and a moral pestilence of envy and vengeance, the men of crime and revolution.”

— Charles Dickens

313. “Let me feel now what sharp distress I may.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

315. “It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world – oh, woe is me! – and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

— Charles Dickens

316. “I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.”

— Charles Dickens

317. “No one is useless in this world,′ retorted the Secretary, ’who lightens the burden of it for any one else.”

— Charles Dickens

318. “Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day!”

— Charles Dickens

319. “I ate ’umble pie with an appetite.”

— Charles Dickens

320. “Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the cast iron-works of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag.”

— Charles Dickens

321. “Mr. and Mrs. Boffin sat staring at mid-air, and Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history.”

— Charles Dickens

322. “Let no man talk of murderers escaping justice, and hint that providence must sleep.”

— Charles Dickens

323. “If great criminals told the truth – which, being great criminals, they do not – they would very rarely tell of their struggles against the crime. Their struggles are towards it. They buffet with opposing waves, to gain the bloody shore, not to recede from it.”

— Charles Dickens

324. “In this round world of many circles within circles, do we make a weary journey from the high grade to the low, to find at last that they lie close together, that the two extremes touch, and that our journey’s end is but our starting-place?”

— Charles Dickens

325. “All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

327. “Death is nature’s remedy for all things.”

— Charles Dickens

328. “She indulged in melancholy, that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries...”

— Charles Dickens

329. “In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

332. “For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now, a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years, but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

334. “Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.”

— Charles Dickens

335. “A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.”

— Charles Dickens

336. “I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.”

— Charles Dickens

337. “The shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.”

— Charles Dickens

338. “A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.”

— Charles Dickens

339. “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”

— Charles Dickens

340. “Let me see you ride a donkey over my green again, and as sure as you have a head upon your shoulders, I’ll knock your bonnet off, and tread upon it!”

— Charles Dickens

341. “It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.”

— Charles Dickens

342. “The aphorism “Whatever is, is right,” would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence that nothing that ever was, was wrong.”

— Charles Dickens

343. “External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.”

— Charles Dickens

344. “The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.”

— Charles Dickens

345. “I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.”

— Charles Dickens

346. “At this time of the rolling year,” the specter said, “I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?”

— Charles Dickens

347. “These people hated me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon me in my prosperity with the basest meanness.”

— Charles Dickens

348. “There lives at least one being who can never change-one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness-who lives but in your eyes-who breathes but in your smiles-who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you.”

— Charles Dickens

349. “A man must take the fat with the lean.”

— Charles Dickens

350. “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”

— Charles Dickens