Quotes from Charles Dickens

As Hamlet says, Hercules may lay about him with his club in every possible direction, but he can't prevent the cats from making a most intolerable row on the roofs of the houses, or the dogs from being shot in the hot weather if they run about the streets unmuzzled

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.

I fear not yet. It would be dangerous for Charles yet.

The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

I am afraid to think of what I might have done, on requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.

Mr. Gradgrind, apprised of his wife's decease, made an expedition from London, and buried her in a business-like manner. He then returned with promptitude to the national cinder-heap, and resumed his sifting for the odds and ends he wanted, and his throwing of the dust about into they eyes of other people who wanted other odds and ends - in fact, he resumed his parliamentary duties.

Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!

You deepen the injury. It is sufficient already.

No había esperado poder alcanzar la riqueza en la capital, pues, de haberse hecho tales ilusiones no habría llegado a prosperar. Esperaba tener que trabajar, encontró trabajo y lo llevaba a cabo. En eso consistía su prosperidad. Desde los tiempos en que era siempre verano en el Edén, hasta los actuales en que casi puede decirse que el invierno es perpetuo

Who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind!

If any preposterous bill were brought forward, for giving poor grubbing devils of authors a right to their own property I should like to say, that I for one would never consent to opposing an insurmountable bar to the diffusion of literature among the people...

For the same reason that I am not a hoarder of money,' said the old man, 'I am not lavish of it. Some people find their gratification in storing it up; and others theirs in parting with it; but I have no gratification connected with the thing. Pain and bitterness are the only goods it ever could procure for me. I hate it. It is a spectre walking before me through the world, and making every social pleasure hideous.

On inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly—a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away.

The best fellow in the world!' cried Wolf. 'It as only last week that Nobley said to me, "By Gad, Wolf, I've got a living to bestow, and if you had but been brought up at the University, strike me blind if I wouldn't have made a parson of you!

I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing unsympathetically over the human countenance.

Now you're just a stranger, with all my secrets.

A kind and generous man by nature, he had stumbled, by chance, over that common Philosopher`s stone (much more easily discovered than the object of the alchemist`s researches), which sometimes trips up kind and generous men, and has the fatal property of turning gold to dross and every precious thing to poor account.

To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.

I am, sir,' said Mr Tigg, striking himself upon the breast, 'a premium tulip, of a very different growth and cultivation from the cabbage Slyme, sir.

And Ralph always wound up these mental soliloquies by arriving at the conclusion, that there was nothing like money.

Toby's nose was very red, and his eye-lids were very red, and he winked very much, and his shoulders were very near his ears and his legs were very stiff, and altogether he was evidently a long way upon the frosty of cool.

No. Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? 'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it's worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.

If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?