Quotes by Charles Dickens

For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.

I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change."

It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years it was a splendid laugh!

No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused.

But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof.

Some people are nobody's enemies but their own.

Please, sir, I want some more.

It is because I think so much of warm and sensitive hearts, that I would spare them from being wounded.

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

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Yes, on the ground.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.

A very little key will open a very heavy door.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

No one is useless in this world, who lightens the burden of it for any one else.

In the little world in which children have their existence, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.

I feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life.