Inspirational Quotes by Charles Dickens (English Novelist)

Inspirational Quotations by Charles Dickens (English Novelist)

Charles Dickens (1812–70) was one of England’s greatest novelists. This quintessential Victorian author is recognized primarily for his epic stories, vivid characters, and thorough portrayal of contemporary life.

Dickens’s story is one of the rags to riches. He was born in Portsmouth. His schooling was brief because his father was imprisoned for bad debt. In the custom of the time, the whole family, except for Charles, was sent to prison along with their patriarch. Two days after his 12th birthday, Dickens was sent to work as a boy-apprentice in a blacking factory, pasting labels on pots of dye for 12 hours a day in a rat-infested warehouse. After four months, he was rescued by his father and allowed to resume his education. The humiliating stigma and the appalling conditions, as well as loneliness and despair, became fictionalized in two of Dickens’s better-known novels David Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–61.)

Critical estimation of Dickens’s literary career commonly splits his novels into two sets: the early novels, from his début with The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) to David Copperfield, and his later novels, beginning with Bleak House (1853.) Admirers of all that is commonly meant by the term Dickensian—the novelist’s irrepressible verve and his inexhaustible supply of eccentrics, comic situations, emotions, and humor—locate Dickens’s greatness in his first period.

Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol (1843,) remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist (1837–39) and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction.

Dickens managed a full social and personal life while working at a frenzied pace. As well as a massive list of novels he published an autobiography, edited weekly periodicals including Household Words and All Year Round, wrote travel books and administered charitable organizations. He was also a theatre enthusiast, wrote plays, and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851. His later career was marked by domestic unhappiness, in which he separated from his wife and had an affair with Ellen Teman, an actress 20 years his junior. He died of a stroke in 1870 and is buried at Westminster Abbey.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Dickens

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
—Charles Dickens

Take example by your father, my boy, and be very careful of vidders all your life, specially if they’ve kept a public house, Sammy.
—Charles Dickens

There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories – Ghost Stories, or more shame for us – round the Christmas fire; and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Winter

Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Business

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Time, Youth

“Somehow he [Tim] gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant for them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas

There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection with manner.
—Charles Dickens

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Fashion, Dress

A wailing, rushing sound, which shook the walls as though a giant’s hand were on them; then a hoarse roar, as if the sea had risen; then such a whirl and tumult that the air seemed mad; and then, with a lengthened howl, the waves of wind swept on.
—Charles Dickens

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that everyone of those darkly clustered houses encloses it’s own secret that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of it’s imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Reflection, Humanity, Secrets

Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Improvement

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.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Crime

The old, old fashion—death! Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet—of immortality!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Immortality

With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Hypocrisy

The law is sic a ass – a idiot.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Government

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Alcohol, Alcoholism

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Worry, Mental Illness

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Emotions

Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Kindness, Heart

A lady of what is commonly called an uncertain temper—a phrase which being interpreted signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Anger, Temper

Dollars! All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures were gauged by their dollars; life was auctioned, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honor and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Nature and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to them!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Money

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Bores, Boredom

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature.—I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
—Charles Dickens

Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. If a man habituated to a narrow circle of cares and pleasures, out of which he seldom travels, step beyond it, though for never so brief a space, his departure from the monotonous scene on which he has been an actor of importance would seem to be the signal for instant confusion. The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Change

Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Weather

Charity begins at home and justice begins next door.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Justice, Welfare, Charity

The stranger in the land who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Friendship

A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas

Time is the greatest and longest established spinner of all … His factory is a secret place, his work noiseless, and his hands are mutes.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Time, Time Management

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Existence

A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from, or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable or more cruel.
—Charles Dickens

Lord, keep my memory green.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Memory, Thought, Reason

Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within; …
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Rain

Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances… in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Family

A friendly swarry, consisting of a boiled leg of mutton with the usual trimmings.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Eating

There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent and sincere earnestness.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Sincerity, Men

Minerva House was “a finishing establishment for young ladies,” where some twenty girls of the ages from thirteen to nineteen inclusive, acquired a smattering of everything and a knowledge of nothing.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Education, School

Credit is a system whereby a person who cannot pay gets another person who cannot pay to guarantee that he can pay.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Debt

It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Cries, Crying

Never sign a valentine with your own name.
—Charles Dickens