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Charles Dickens

88 quotes

“A person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking match.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them—none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I revere the memory of Mr. F. as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint bottle; it was not ecstasy but it was comfort.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Papa is a preferable mode of address," observed Mrs General. "Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company — on entering a room, for instance — Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together...”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money and goods are certainly the best of references.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Professionally he declines and falls, and as a friend he drops into poetry.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He do the Police in different voices.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll's house.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't care whether I am a Minx or a Sphinx.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And if it's proud to have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts," Miss Jenny struck in, flushed, "she is proud.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's the state to live and die in!...R-r-rich!”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must scrunch or be scrunched.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'No one is useless in this world,' retorted the Secretary, 'who lightens the burden of it for any one else.'”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wherever religion is resorted to as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull, monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please. They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous; and they who enlarge with the greatest pertinacity on the difficulty of getting into heaven will be considered, by all true believers, certain of going there: though it would be hard to say by what process of reasoning this conclusion is arrived at.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) first seen 1842 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: American Notes (1842), Ch. 3
“I was present, myself, at the execution of Courvoisier. I was, purposely, on the spot, from midnight of the night before; and was a near witness of the whole process of the building of the scaffold, the gathering of the crowd, the gradual swelling of the concourse with the coming-on of day, the hanging of the man, the cutting of the body down, and the removal of it into the prison. From the moment of my arrival, when there were but a few score boys in the street, and those all young thieves, and all clustered together behind the barrier nearest to the drop – down to the time when I saw the body with its dangling head, being carried on a wooden bier into the gaol – I did not see one token in all the immense crowd; at the windows, in the streets, on the house-tops, anywhere; of any one emotion suitable to the occasion. No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) first seen 1846 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to the editors of The Daily News (28 February 1846), p. 6, as cited on the The Charles Dickens Letters Project website.
“If the people at large be not already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they never will be. ...Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of considerable revolutions of time, the celebrated Cocker was born, and died; Walkinghame, of the Tutor's Assistant, and well versed in figures, was also born, and died; a multitude of accountants, book-keepers and actuaries, were born, and died. Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to be kept on certain splints of elm wood called "tallies." In the reign of George III an inquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected. All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? I dare say there was a vast amount of minuting, memoranduming, and despatch-boxing on this mighty subject. The sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million of the cost thereof, the national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and the little old woman, Britannia, hasn't got home to-night. ...The great, broad, and true cause that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the sun, moon, and stars.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) first seen 1855 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Administrative Reform" (June 27, 1855) Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Speeches Literary and Social by Charles Dickens (1870) pp. 133-134
“I wish I were Commander in Chief of India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement (not in the least regarding them as if they lived in the Strand, London, or at Camden Town), should be to proclaim to them in their language, that I considered my Holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I begged them to do me the favor to observe that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was now proceeding, which all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) first seen 1857 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Indian Rebellion of 1857, in a letter to Baronness Burdett-Coutts (4 October 1857)
“I put a New Testament among your books, for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes that made me write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child; because it is the best book that ever was or will be known in the world, and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can possibly be guided. As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all to guide themselves by this book, putting aside the interpretations and inventions of men.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) first seen 1868 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Edward Dickens (26 September 1868), published in The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, Edited by Jenny Hartley
“The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement... I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He is not, as he forcibly remarks, ‘one of those fortunate men who, if they were to dive under one side of a barge stark–naked, would come up on the other with a new suit of clothes on, and a ticket for soup in the waistcoat–pocket:’ neither is he one of those, whose spirit has been broken beyond redemption by misfortune and want. He is just one of the careless, good–for–nothing, happy fellows, who float, cork–like, on the surface, for the world to play at hockey with: knocked here, and there, and everywhere: now to the right, then to the left, again up in the air, and anon to the bottom, but always reappearing and bounding with the stream buoyantly and merrily along.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London. He awakens no sympathy in the breast of any single person; his existence is a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive. There is a numerous class of people in this great metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for. Urged by imperative necessity in the first instance, they have resorted to London in search of employment, and the means of subsistence. It is hard, we know, to break the ties which bind us to our homes and friends, and harder still to efface the thousand recollections of happy days and old times, which have been slumbering in our bosoms for years, and only rush upon the mind, to bring before it associations connected with the friends we have left, the scenes we have beheld too probably for the last time, and the hopes we once cherished, but may entertain no more. These men, however, happily for themselves, have long forgotten such thoughts. Old country friends have died or emigrated; former correspondents have become lost, like themselves, in the crowd and turmoil of some busy city; and they have gradually settled down into mere passive creatures of habit and endurance.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused — in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened — by the recurrence of Christmas. There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be; that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope, or happy prospect, of the year before, dimmed or passed away; that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes — of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends, and of the cold looks that meet them now, in adversity and misfortune. Never heed such dismal reminiscences. There are few men who have lived long enough in the world, who cannot call up such thoughts any day in the year. Then do not select the merriest of the three hundred and sixty-five for your doleful recollections, but draw your chair nearer the blazing fire — fill the glass and send round the song — and if your room be smaller than it was a dozen years ago, or if your glass be filled with reeking punch, instead of sparkling wine, put a good face on the matter, and empty it off-hand, and fill another, and troll off the old ditty you used to sing, and thank God it’s no worse. Look on the merry faces of your children (if you have any) as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty; one slight form that gladdened the father’s heart, and roused the mother’s pride to look upon, may not be there. Dwell not upon the past; think not that one short year ago, the fair child now resolving into dust, sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gaiety of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings — of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Who will wonder that Barbara had a headache, or that Barbara's mother was disposed to be cross, or that she slightly underrated Astley's, and thought the clown was older than they had taken him to be last night? Kit was not surprised to hear her say so--not he. He had already had a misgiving that the inconstant actors in that dazzling vision had been doing the same thing the night before last, and would do it again that night, and the next, and for weeks and months to come, though he would not be there. Such is the difference between yesterday and today. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.'”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an ironhanded and a grinding despotism! Oh my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and fellow-men! I tell you that the hour is come, when we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon the holy and eternal privileges of Brotherhood!”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since, — on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body!”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“My life is one demd horrid grind.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“In a Pickwickian sense.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“When found, make a note of.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“Barkis is willin'.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, all very good words for the lips,--especially prunes and prism.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) said by 1870 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source