Quotes By Charles Dickens

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you.

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

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.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favor of two.

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

'Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.

Do you spell it with a "V" or a "W"?' inquired the judge. 'That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord'.