Charles Dickens Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Charles Dickens Motivational Quotations:

• “We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”

•  “A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.”

•  “Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

•  “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

•  “So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!...”

•  “Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman.”

•  “I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.”

•  “She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.”

•  “There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”

•  “She had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.”

• “In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.”

• “I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making explanation for itself and wearing it out. ”

• “Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son.”

  

   

• “The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with red upon it that the sun had never give, and would never take away.”

•  “Today, as a result of the policy of Macmillan's Government, Great Britain presents in the United Nations the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.”

•  “Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”

•  “And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.”

•  “The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, 'One can only work on, you know--work while it is day.”

•  “My favourite hiding place was in the world of Charles Dickens. I knew every word he had ever cared to collect in a novel by heart. The sentences formed in my mind before my eyes could skim through the letters.”

​ 

• “There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last!”

•  “Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this …. The quarrel between the North and the South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."

•  “A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.”

•  “A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pitty in all the glittering multitude.”

•  “What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead men never bring awkward stories to light. The prospect of the gallows, too, makes them hardy and bold. Ah, it’s a fine thing for the trade! Five of them strung up in a row, and none left to play booty or turn white-livered!”

•  “To do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and you may take any means which the end to be attained will justify.”

•  “I like Mr. Dickens’ books much better than yours, Papa. Said one of Thackeray’s daughters.”

•  “He takes out his anger by having his carriage speed through the streets, scattering the commoners in the way.”

•  “One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written.”\

•  “My impression is, after many years of consideration, that there never can have been anybody in the world who played worse.”

•  “There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.”

•  “In short, I should have liked to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet be man enough to know its value”

•  “It’s Christmas Day!” said Scrooge to himself. “I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can.”

•  “If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.”

•  “Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures," replied Estella, with a glance towards him, "hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”

•  “... we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationary.”

•  “There are many things which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited”

•  “It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.”

•  “Our love had begun in folly, and ended in madness!”