Top 500 Charles Dickens Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

— Charles Dickens

352. “I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.”

— Charles Dickens

353. “I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.”

— Charles Dickens

354. “Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: What then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

356. “It is one of the easiest achievements in life to offend your family when your family want to get rid of you.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

359. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

361. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

365. “I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.”

— Charles Dickens

366. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

368. “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

369. “Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.”

— Charles Dickens

370. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

381. “Depth answers only to depth .”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

Featured in: Country Quotes

384. “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

385. “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. Chapter Ten The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke, that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

387. “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

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

— Charles Dickens

389. “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

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

— 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. “Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold.”

— Charles Dickens

393. “Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold.”

— Charles Dickens

394. “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

395. “There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver.”

— Charles Dickens

396. “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

397. “A word in earnest is as good as a speech.”

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens

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

— Charles Dickens