Charles Dickens Quotes

881 Sourced Quotes

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

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

Charles Dickens
Mr. Augustus Minns was a bachelor, of about forty as he said — of about eight-and-forty as his friends said. He was always exceedingly clean, precise, and tidy: perhaps somewhat priggish, and the most retiring man in the world.

Charles Dickens
She's the only sylph I ever saw, who could stand upon one leg, and play the tambourine on her other knee, like a sylph.
Mr Crummles

Charles Dickens
I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am - what shall I say I am today?

Charles Dickens
I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.

Charles Dickens
The nephew revenges himself for this, by holding his breath and terrifying his kinswoman with the dread belief that he has made up his mind to burst. Regardless of whispers and shakes, he swells and becomes discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes discoloured, until the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him out, with no visible neck, and with his eyes going before him like a prawn's.

Charles Dickens
Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten.

Charles Dickens
The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among men.

Charles Dickens
"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."

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

Charles Dickens
"I take my leave of you, Mr. Creakle, and all of you," said Mr. Mell, glancing round the room, and again patting me gently on the shoulders. "James Steerforth, the best wish I can leave you is that you may come to be ashamed of what you have done today. At present I would prefer to see you anything rather than a friend, to me, or to anyone in whom I feel an interest."

Charles Dickens
It was a dagger in the haughty father's heart, an arrow in his brain, to see how the flesh and blood he could not disown clung to this obscure stranger, and he sitting by. Not that he cared to whom his daughter turned, or from whom turned away. The swift sharp agony struck through him, as he thought of what his son might do.

Charles Dickens
"Well," said my aunt, "this is his boy - his son. He would be as like his father as it's possible to be, if he was not so like his mother, too."

Charles Dickens
Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its death-shock.

Charles Dickens
Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

Charles Dickens
Still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine.

Charles Dickens
It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black.

Charles Dickens
"Madam," replied Mr. Micawber, "it is my intention to register such a vow on the virgin page of the future."

Charles Dickens
"Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing."

Charles Dickens
Fledgeby deserved Mr. Alfred Lammle's eulogium. He was the meanest cur existing, with a single pair of legs. And instinct (a word we all clearly understand) going largely on four legs, and reason always on two, meanness on four legs never attains the perfection of meanness on two.

Charles Dickens
And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.

Charles Dickens
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.

Charles Dickens
"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."

Charles Dickens
Everything that Mr Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly.

Charles Dickens
"My good fellow," retorted Mr. Boffin, "you have my word; and how you can have that, without my honour too, I don't know. I've sorted a lot of dust in my time, but I never knew the two things go into separate heaps."

Charles Dickens
But wot's that, you're a-doin' of? Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, Sammy?

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

Charles Dickens
"Then what can you want to do now?" said the old lady,gaining courage. "I wants to make your flesh creep," replied the boy.

Charles Dickens
When death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes.

Charles Dickens