Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

354. “Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones.”

— Charles Dickens

355. “The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”

— Charles Dickens

356. “For the night-wind has a dismal trick of wandering round and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; and of trying, with its unseen hand, the windows and the doors; and seeking out some crevices by which to enter.”

— Charles Dickens

357. “It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.”

— Charles Dickens

358. “Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.”

— Charles Dickens

359. “Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.”

— Charles Dickens

360. “That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.”

— Charles Dickens

361. “In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out.”

— Charles Dickens

362. “I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere.”

— Charles Dickens

363. “If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge’s nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I’ll cultivate his acquaintance.”

— Charles Dickens

364. “Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.”

— Charles Dickens

365. “There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit, when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been.”

— Charles Dickens

366. “Keep out of Chancery. It’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.”

— Charles Dickens

367. “To close the eyes, and give a seemly comfort to the apparel of the dead, is poverty’s holiest touch of nature.”

— Charles Dickens

368. “Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead.”

— Charles Dickens

369. “Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.”

— Charles Dickens

370. “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

— Charles Dickens

371. “Depth answers only to depth .”

— Charles Dickens

372. “Only one soul was to be seen, and that was Madame Defarge – who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.”

— Charles Dickens

373. “Money can’t buy a happy life, or a peaceful death.”

— Charles Dickens

374. “It’s over, and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man’s head off.”

— Charles Dickens

375. “You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay.”

— Charles Dickens

376. “Your voice and music are the same to me.”

— Charles Dickens

377. “No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”

— Charles Dickens

378. “At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.”

— Charles Dickens

379. “Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.”

— Charles Dickens

380. “My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.”

— Charles Dickens

381. “Toor rul lol loo, gammon and spinnage, the frog he wouldn’t, and high cockolorum,’ said the Dodger: with a slight sneer on his intellectual countenance.”

— Charles Dickens

382. “Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.”

— Charles Dickens

383. “All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.”

— Charles Dickens

384. “Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.”

— Charles Dickens

385. “We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. “And will continue friends apart,” said Estella. 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

386. “Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand.” Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.”

— Charles Dickens

387. “There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands.”

— Charles Dickens

388. “There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with.”

— Charles Dickens

389. “Scattered wits take a long time in picking up.”

— Charles Dickens

390. “At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common.”

— Charles Dickens

391. “It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.”

— Charles Dickens

392. “She had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.”

— Charles Dickens

393. “When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel.”

— Charles Dickens

394. “Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.”

— Charles Dickens

395. “Of all bad listeners, the worst and most terrible to encounter is the man who is so fond of listening that he wishes to hear, not only your conversation, but that of every other person in the room.”

— Charles Dickens

396. “The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance.”

— Charles Dickens

397. “I think it must somewhere be written that the virtues of mothers shall be visited on their children, as well as the sins of their fathers.”

— Charles Dickens

398. “Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.”

— Charles Dickens

399. “Gold, for the instant, lost its luster in his eyes, for there were countless treasures of the heart which it could never purchase.”

— Charles Dickens

400. “Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.”

— Charles Dickens