1,913 Quotes by Charles Dickens

It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.

Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, vhen you ain't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant

It matters little, she said, softly. "To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.

... The sun does not shine upon this fair earth to meet frowning eyes, depend upon it.

Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks in the floor from which the blood will not be taken out. You may scrape and scrape, as the present owner has done, or plane and plane, as his father did, or scrub and scrub, as his grandfather did, or burn and burn with strong acids, as his great-grandfather did, but, there the blood will still be - no redder and no paler - no more and no less - always just the same.

The receptive attitude enables one mind to fix itself to another as by spiritual grappling-irons. When you see that every word you utter us taken in, and weighed, and measured by your listener, you cannot free yourself from the influence of his presence. You are compelled to have in your thoughts not only the words you utter, but the man to whom they are spoken. You must not only talk, and talk well, but you must talk to him.

The worst class of sum worked in the every-day world is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as to their own.

He knew enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart.

Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day!