Quotes by Charles Dickens (Page 3 of 4)

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.

'Mind and matter,' said the lady in the wig, 'glide swift into the vortex if immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.'

Their demeanor is invariably morose, sullen, clownish and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humor, vivacity, or the capacity for enjoyment.

O' course I came to look arter you, my darlin', replied Mr. Weller; for once permitting his passion to get the better of his veracity.

The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and in short you are for ever floored.

Time has been lost and opportunity thrown away, but I am yet a young man, and may retrieve it.

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

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

A new heart for a New Year, always!

Champagne is simply one of the elegant extras of life.

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.

The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues -- faith and hope.

The coffee was boiling over a charcoal fire, and large slices of bread and butter were piled one upon the other like deals in a lumber yard.

I revere the memory of Mr. F. as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint bottle; it was not ecstasy but it was comfort.

And a cool four thousand, Pip!
I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour.

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

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.

Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.

God bless us, every one!

Every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

Waiter! raw beef-steak for the gentleman's eye,-nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient-damned odd standing in the open street half-an-hour, with your eye against a lamp.

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

Quadruped lions are said to be savage, only when they are hungry; biped lions are rarely sulky longer than when their appetite for distinction remains unappeased.

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.

The cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.

It is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.

The word of a gentleman is as good as his bond -- sometimes better; as in the present case, where his bond might prove but a doubtful sort of security.

Reflect upon your present blessings -- of which every man has many -- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong current.

Christmas is a poor excuse every 25th of December to pick a man's pockets.

And it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

The lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had never given, and would never take away.

He was sailing over a boundless expanse of sea, with a blood-red sky above, and the angry waters, lashed into fury beneath, boiling and eddying up, on every side. There was another vessel before them, toiling and labouring in the howling storm: her canvas fluttering in ribbons from the mast.

My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs.

Polly put the kettle on, we'll all have tea.

But, for all that, they had a very pleasant walk. The trees were bare of leaves, and the river was bare of water-lilies; but the sky was not bare of its beautiful blue, and the water reflected it, and a delicious wind ran with the stream, touching the surface crisply.

I never heerd...nor read of nor see in picters, any angel in tights and gaiters...but...he's a reg'lar thoroughbred angel for all that.

Heavens knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.

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.

You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer, said Miss Pross, in her breathing. Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.

Christmas a humbug, uncle! said Scrooge's nephew. You don't mean that, I am sure? I do, said Scrooge. Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.

I find the nights long, for I sleep but little, and think much.

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

So, 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.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,.

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.

If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.

The dew seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves the air to rustle among them with a sweeter music and the sky itself to look more blue and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects.

The year end brings no greater pleasure then the opportunity to express to you season's greetings and good wishes. May your holidays and new year be filled with joy.

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

I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.

I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

His face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.

Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold.

I never see any difference in boys. I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys and beef-faced boys.

So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you!

Death is a mighty, universal truth.