1,913 Quotes by Charles Dickens

This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for not playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and doing noting for his livelihood. In the next cell, was another man, who was going to the same prison for hawking tin saucepans without a licence; thereby doing something for his living, in defiance of the Stamp-office.

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!

Ablamın verdiği terbiye beni çekingen, içli bir çocuk yapmıştı. Kimin tarafından yetiştirilirse yetiştirilsin, bir çocuğun küçücük evreninde en derinden sezilen, en ince algılanan şey, haksızlıktır. Çocuğa yapılan haksızlık küçücük bir şey olabilir. Ne var ki çocuk da, çocuğun dünyası da küçücüktür; bu ölçüler içinde çocuğun tahta atı en iri küheylanların boyundadır. Ablamın o esintili, hırslı baskısıyla bana haksızlık ettiğini, kendimi bildiğimden beri biliyordum.

I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.

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!

A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.

The dreams of childhood—its airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond: so good to be believed-in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for the least among them rises to the stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering the little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world

I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian should.

[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.