Quotes from Charles Dickens

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

A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without surprising anybody. He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.

However, the Sun himself is weak when he first rises, and gathers strength and courage as the day gets on.

Pip, dear old chap. life is made of ever many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man's a blacksmith and one's a whitesmith, one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come.

If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.

Be guided only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities.

Come! Let us make that bargain. Think of me at my best, if circumstances should ever part us!

Says it with his head on!" Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.

unless we learn to do our duty to those whom we employ, they will never learn to do their duty to us

Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; 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 the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

They'll not blame me. They'll not object to me. They'll not mind what I do, if it's wrong. I'm only Mr. Dick.

he is a confoundedly bad kind of man. He is a slow-torturing kind of man. He is no more like flesh and blood than a rusty old carbine is. He is a kind of man?by George!?that has caused more restlessness, and more uneasiness, and more dissatisfaction with myself than all other men put together. That's the kind of man Mr. Tulkinghorn is!

Mrs General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people's opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere.

Man is but mortal; and there is a point beyond which human courage cannot extend.

Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!

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.

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

if I was a painter, and was to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?...I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam. for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like an Ostrich, for putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it -' ...'And like a Phoenix, for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices, and soaring up anew into the sky!

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Every man thinks his own geese swans.

I never heard that it had been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection. I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.

Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.

I am in a ridiculous humour,' quoth Eugene; 'I am a ridiculous fellow. Everything is ridiculous. Come along!