Quotes from Charles Dickens

Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does.

To this it must be added, that life in a wig is to a large class of people much more terrifying and impressive than life with its own head of hair …

There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves and a skeleton of truth that we never did.

Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits went on - and it did a world of good which never became manifest.

The happiness he gives is quite as great, as if it cost a fortune.

I dare say our is likely to be a rather long engagement, but our motto is "Wait and hope!" We always say that. "Wait and hope!" we always say.

I have broken where I should have bent; and have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all God's great creation. The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother. I have turned from the world, and I pay the penalty.

Shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some offhand manner, never meant to go right.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?

The law is a ass, Sir!

Gradually, he fell into that deep tranquil sleep which ease from recent suffering alone imparts; that calm and peaceful rest which it is pain to wake from. Who, if this were death, would be roused again to all the struggles and turmoils of life; to all its cares for the present; its anxieties for the future; more than all, its weary recollections of the past!

Mr Pickwick awoke the next morning, there was not a symptom of rheumatism about him; which proves, as Mr Bob Sawyer very justly observed, that there is nothing like hot punch in such cases; and that if ever hot punch did fail to act as a preventive, it was merely because the patient fell in to the vulgar error of not taking enough of it.

So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.

He is of what is called the old school - a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young.

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.

growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

You know, there is no language of vegetables, which converts a cucumber into a formal declaration of attachment.

Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do'...He might have written with as much truth, 'Satan finds some mischief for busy hands too.' The busy people achieve their full share of mischief in the world, you may rely upon it. What have the people been about, who have been the busiest in getting money, and in getting power, this century or two? No mischief?

For a long time, Oliver remained motionless in this attitude. The candle was burning low in the socket when he rose to his feet. Having gazed cautiously round him, and listened intently, he gently undid the fastenings of the door, and looked abroad.

Oh, but reasoning is so much worse than scolding!... I didn't marry to be reasoned with. If you meant to reason with such a poor little thing as I am, you ought to have told me so, you cruel boy!

I am not at all respectable, and I don't want to be. Odd perhaps, but so it is!

Such,' thought Mr. Pickwick, 'are the narrow views of those philosophers who, content with examining the things that lie before them, look not to the truths which are hidden beyond.

There are tales among us that you have sold yourself to the devil, and I know not what.' 'We all have, have we not?' returned the stranger, looking up. 'If we were fewer in number, perhaps he would give better wages.