Quotes by Charles Dickens (Page 2 of 3)

I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!

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.

It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed at home.

Yet he would smoke his pipe at the Battery with a far more sagacious air then anywhere else -- even with a learned air -- as if he considered himself to be advancing immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did.

The contention came, after all, to this -- the secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.

On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip -- such is Life!

Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better.

Would it be weakness to return my love?

Here my sister, after a fit of clappings and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down -- which were the last stages on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect fury and a complete success, she made a dash to the door.

The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.

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.

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

I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.

Opening her eyes again, and seeing her husband's face across the table, she leaned forward to give it a pat on the cheek, and sat down to supper, declaring it to be the best face in the world.

And, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.

I ain't took so many year to make a gentleman, not without knowing what's due to him.

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

My guiding star always is, Get hold of portable property.

He had a certain air of being a handsome man-which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man-which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

Do not close your heart against all my efforts to help you.

When he saw her sitting there all alone, so young, and good, and beautiful, and kind to him; and heard her thrilling voice, so natural and sweet, and such a golden link between him and all his life's love and happiness, rising out of the silence; he turned his face away, and hid his tears.

And yet I love him. I love him so much and so dearly, that when I sometimes think my life may be but a weary one, I am proud of it and glad of it. I am proud and glad to suffer something for him, even though it is of no service to him, and he will never know of it or care for it.

Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress.

You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me.

Possibly we might even improve the world a little, if we got up early in the morning, and took off our coats to the work.

If you can't get to be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip, and live well and die happy.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Ride on! Ride on over all obstacles and win the race.

(On finding love later in life)
Let's be a comfortable couple, and take care of each other! And if we should get deaf, or lame, or blind, or bed-ridden, how glad we shall be that we have somebody we are fond of, always to talk to and sit with! Let's be a comfortable couple. Now do, my dear!

I verily believe that her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again, inwardly -- and that is the sharpest crying of all.

I wear the chain I forged in life....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.

Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused-- in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened-- by the recurrence of Christmas.

New thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the colours of my life were changing.

As to sleep, you know, I never sleep now. I might be a Watchman, except that I don't get any pay, and he's got nothing on his mind.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.

It was but imagination, yet imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the reality would have come and gone, and there an end, but in imagination it was always coming, and never went away.

The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it.

I don't like that sort of school... where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged... where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines.

It's an old habit of mine, Wal'r, said the Captain, any time these fifty year. When you see Ned Cuttle bite his nails, Wal'r, then you may know that Ned Cuttle's aground.

You are too young to know how the world changes everyday,' said Mrs Creakle, 'and how the people in it pass away. But we all have to learn it, David; some of us when we are young, some of us when we are old, some of us at all times in our lives.

I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt, and, of course, if it ceased to beat, I would cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no--sympathy--sentiment--nonsense.

And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is, that O 'tis love, 'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round!

I fear your kind and open communication, which has rendered me more painfully conscious of my own defects, has not improved me, sighed Kate.

I always loved that boy as if he'd been my -- my -- my own grandfather.

Oliver Twist has asked for more!

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

I am in the theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession.I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy; and my chaise-pony goes on, in Timour the Tartar.

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

What a troublesome world this is, when one has the most right to expect it to be as agreeable as possible.

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up.

Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness; the old year was preparing, like an ancient philosopher, to call his friends around him, and amidst the sound of feasting and revelry to pass gently and calmly away.

She's a very charming and delightful creature, quoth Mr. Robert Sawyer, in reply; and has only one fault that I know of, Ben. It happens, unfortunately, that that single blemish is a want of taste. She don't like me.

Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself.

We all have some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time -- of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances.

Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.

Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, vhen you an't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant.

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.

Nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.

Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead, said Scrooge. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.

I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me.

All is going on as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity's small change in general society.

How slight a thing will disturb the equanimity of our frail minds!

This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.

When I speak of home, I speak of the place where in default of a better -- those I love are gathered together; and if that place where a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding.

The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.

Of little worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it were not.

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine.

If ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal and bear the stamp of heaven.

Ah, if only I had brought a cigar with me! This would have established my identity.

Her heart-is given him, with all its love and truth. She would joyfully die with him, or, better than that, die for him. She knows he has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and think well of.

In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.

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.

Although a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere unit among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him, it by no means follows that he can dispossess himself, with equal facility, of a very strong sense of the importance and magnitude of his cares.

He was simply and staunchly true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small. So all true souls ever are. So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.

Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.

If they would rather die, ... they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

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.

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.

His shoes looked too large; his sleeve looked too long; his hair looked too limp; his features looked too mean; his exposed throat looked as if a halter would have done it good.

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.

Over the whole, a young lady presided, whose gloomy haughtiness as she surveyed the street, announced a deep-seated grievance against society, and an implacable determination to be avenged.

Troubles are exceedingly gregarious in their nature, and flying in flocks are apt to perch capriciously.

Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness.

Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.

He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him. ~ Stephen speaking of Rachael.

The sergeant was describing a military life. It was all drinking, he said, except that there were frequent intervals of eating and love making.

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.

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.

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

From the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has invariably gone one way Charles Darnay's way the way of the love of a woman.

that the mounds of ices, and the bowls of mint-julep and sherry cobbler they make in these latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.

We must have humbug, we all like humbug, we couldn't get on without humbug.

If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

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.

There were more children there than Scrooge in his agitated mind could count, and unlike the celebrated poem, not every forty children were acting as one, but every child was acting as forty.

Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Old Marley was dead as a doornail... The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

He was a very young boy; quite a little child. His hair still hung in curls about his face, and his eyes were very bright; but their light was of Heaven, not earth.

All I would say is, that I can go abroad without your family coming forward to favour me, -- in short, with a parting Shove of their cold shoulders; and that, upon the whole, I would rather leave England with such impetus as I possess, than derive any acceleration of it from that quarter.

What such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.

If Husain (as) had fought to quench his worldly desires…then I do not understand why his sister, wife, and children accompanied him. It stands to reason therefore, that he sacrificed purely for Islam.

Wen you're a married man, Samivel, you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but vether it's worth while goin' through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy sand ven he go to the end of the alphabet, it's a matter of taste.

And to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it.

I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.

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

Other sound than the owl's voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine -- which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity -- it is the key to many reservations.

The two commonest mistakes in judgement ... are, the confounding of shyness with arrogance -- a very common mistake indeed -- and the not understanding that an obstinate nature exists in a perpetual struggle with itself.

Mr. Bazzard's father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son's having written a play.

You fear the world too much,' she answered gently. 'All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off, one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?

They somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other...every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

If the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.

The citizen ... preserved the resolute bearing of one who was not to be frowned down or daunted, and who cared very little for any nobility but that of worth and manhood.

There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning. Learning ain't for me. A person like myself had better not aspire. If he is to get on in life, he must get on 'umbly, Master Copperfield!

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

No, the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me.

There was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine ... 'This is my frugal breakfast ... Give me my peach, my cup of coffee, and my claret.'

Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means.

It is an old prerogative of kings to govern everything but their passions.

The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will.' Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.

I'll tell you, said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, what real love it. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter -- as I did!

Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances... in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.

It was understood that nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to old Barley, by reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject more psychological than gout, rum, and purser's stores.

What do you mean, Phib? asked Miss Squeers, looking in her own little glass, where, like most of us, she saw -- not herself, but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain.

There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.

And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that Christmas has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!

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.

When the locked door opens, and there comes in a young woman, deadly pale, and with long fair hair, who glides to the fire, and sits down in the chair we have left there, wringing her hands.

For a long time, no village girl would dress her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of death: and after many a year had come and gone, the berries growing there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon the hand that plucked them.

As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, -- or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process -- not to be traced by any human sense, -- an awful likeness of himself!

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!

There was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea.

As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal.

Night, like a giant, fills the church, from pavement to roof, and holds dominion through the silent hours. Pale dawn again comes peeping through the windows: and, giving place to day, sees night withdraw into the vaults, and follows it, and drives it out, and hides among the dead.

There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories -- Ghost Stories, or more shame for us -- round the Christmas fire; and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it.

Nobody near me here, but rats, and they are fine stealthy secret fellows.

I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, returned the haunted man.

We came to the house, and it is an old house, full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls.

The beating of my heart was so violent and wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me.

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far we are pursued by nothing else.

I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled.

He had a sense of his dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity.

Equity sends questions to Law. Law sends questions back to equity; Law finds it can't do this, equity finds it can't do that; neither can do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B.

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

Rooms get an awful look about them when they are fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them, and that person is away under any shadow: let alone being God knows where.

Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow.

The man who now confronted Gashford, was a squat, thickset personage, with a low, retreating forehead, a coarse shock head of hair, and eyes so small and near together, that his broken nose alone seemed to prevent their meeting and fusing into one of the usual size.

Most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.

It wasn't the wine, murmured Mr. Snodgrass, in a broken voice. It was the salmon.

Ghost of the Future, he exclaimed, I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?

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

Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness.

It is a silent, shady place, with a paved courtyard so full of echoes, that sometimes I am tempted to believe that faint responses to the noises of old times linger there yet, and that these ghosts of sound haunt my footsteps as I pace it up and down.

Pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass -- an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.

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.

They ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.

Loves and Cupids took to flight afraid, and Martyrdom had no such torment in its painted history of suffering.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.

An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.

Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see triumph.