Quotes by Charles Dickens

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

What greater gift than the love of a cat.

A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.

The most important thing in life is to stop saying I wish and start saying I will. Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.

Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.

He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness. (p. 119)

I never had one hours happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.

The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home together and to rest in her bosom.

In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.

The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a mans. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her Ode to an Expiring Frog, sir.

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

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.

It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched ones self in going by.

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.