Explore Quotes by Charles Dickens

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

I am what you designed me to be.I am your blade. You cannot now complain if you also feel the hurt

Time has been lost and opportunity thrown away, but I am yet a young man, and may retrieve it.

In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and its going.

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.

He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.

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. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!

I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age.

I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.

That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.

You touch some of the reasons for my going, not for my staying away.

Christmas is a poor excuse every 25th of December to pick a man's pockets.

it's not my business," Scrooge returned. "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly.

There's more of gravey than grave about you, whatever you are!" - Scrooge, referring to Marley's ghost which he believes is a hallucination from food poisoning

Nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

He lived in chambers that had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.