Charles Dickens

Novelist

1812-02-07 – 1870-06-09

Charles Dickens was an English novelist and social critic of the Victorian era. His major works include Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and David Copperfield. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers in English literature.

Quotes by Charles Dickens

...I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
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They had an ugly look to one as prone to disgust and fear as the changes of a few hours had made me.
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Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.
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Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!
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But when society is the name for such hollow gentlemen and ladies...and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost ourselves in that same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way out.
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This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy.
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But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn't read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.
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The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.
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The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
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Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues — faith and hope.
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Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects, and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us
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Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?
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It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when the Great Creator was a child himself.
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My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.
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Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.
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. . . for not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent's love.
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and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.
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Give me a moment, because I like to cry for joy. It's so delicious, John dear, to cry for joy.
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The mental agony I have suffered, during the last two days, wrings from me the avowal to you of a passion which, as you well know, is not one of yesterday, nor one I have lightly formed. On Rose, sweet, gentle girl! my heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind. Mother, think better of this, and of me, and do not disregard the happiness of which you seem to think so little.
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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.
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