Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes 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

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

If the law supposes that, said Mr. Bumble, the law is a assa idiot. If thats the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experienceby experience.
—Charles Dickens

There are times when ignorance is bliss, indeed.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Ignorance

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort, and like them, are often successfully cured by remedies in themselves very nauseous and unpalatable.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Mind, Wealth, Laziness

Then Bob proposed: “A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” Which all his family re-echoed. “God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas

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

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

The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Endurance

The suspense—the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick; the desperate anxiety “to be doing something” to relieve the pain or lessen the danger which we have no power to alleviate; and the sinking of soul which the sad sense of our helplessness produces,—what tortures can equal these, and what reflections or efforts can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them.
—Charles Dickens

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Life

I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday – the longer, the better – from the great boarding school where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
—Charles Dickens

I think it must somewhere be written that the virtues of mothers shall be visited on their children, as well as the sins of their fathers.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Mothers, Mother

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days, that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Christmas

We know, Mr. Weller—we, who are men of the world—that a good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: The Military

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: America

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

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

A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.
—Charles Dickens

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

After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked, with the same meditative face, into a back anteroom opening from the yard; and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind’s eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Memory

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage more so.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Attitude

Try to do to others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better that they should fail than that you should.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Failure

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

Keep out of Chancery. It’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Lawyers, Law

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

Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Repentance, Regret, The Present, Remorse, Gratitude, Blessings, Thankfulness, Moving on

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

They are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: News

There is a wisdom of the head, and… a wisdom of the heart.
—Charles Dickens
Topics: Wisdom

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