Quotes by Charles Dickens

I really am a little afraid, my dear,” hinted the cherub meekly, “that you are not enjoying yourself?”“On the contrary,” returned Mrs. Wilfer, “quite so. Why should I not?”“I thought, my dear, that perhaps your face might—““My face might be a martyrdom, but what would that import, or who should know it, if I smiled?”And she did smile; manifestly freezing the blood of Mr. George Sampson by so doing. For that young gentleman, catching her smiling eye, was so very much appalled by its expression as to cast about in his thoughts concerning what he had done to bring it down upon himself.

He was rather a low sort of pony. The fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama too, but too broad--too broad. When the mother died, he took the port-wine business.The port-wine business! cried Nicholas.Drinking port-wine with the clown, said the manager; but he was greedy, and one night bit off the bowl of the glass, and choked himself, so his vulgarity was the death of him at last.

A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported whatthe rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong generalresemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf.Her shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world! he said. There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.

A man may live to be as old as Methuselah,’ said Mr. Filer, ‘and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people as those; and may heap up facts on figures, facts on figures, facts on figures, mountains high and dry; and he can no more hope to persuade ’em that they have no right or business to be married, than he can hope to persuade ’em that they have no earthly right or business to be born. And that we know they haven’t. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!

The great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they dont want; and then they get tired of coming.

A day wasted on others is not wasted on ones self.

if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

Whatsumeer the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart.

I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything

He wouldnt hear of anybodys paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.

That I growed up a man and not a beast says something for me.

If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon all belonging to you!

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

You deepen the injury. It is sufficient already.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them

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!