Charles Dickens
We are so very 'umble.
You don't carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.
Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.
It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.
The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.
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.
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.
Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.
Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.
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.
When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.
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.
Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.
I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life... I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.
May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?
'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'.
The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.
Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.
That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity's small change in general society.
Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.
The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will.' Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.Collection: Inspirational
He was simply and staunchly true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small. So all true souls ever are. So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.Collection: Soul
A very little key will open a very heavy door.Collection: Educational
I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.Collection: Suffering Pain
My advice is to never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.Collection: Procrastination
Do all the good you can and make as little fuss about it as possible.Collection: Life
Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.Collection: Happiness
The world belongs to those who set out to conquer it armed with self confidence and good humour.Collection: Self Confidence
A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.Collection: Love
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.Collection: Spring
We never tire of the friendships we form with books.Collection: Book
The sun himself is weak when he first rises, and gathers strength and courage as the day gets on.Collection: Nature
I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.Collection: Beautiful
The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict.Collection: Class
In every life, no matter how full or empty ones purse, there is tragedy. It is the one promise life always fulfills. Thus, happiness is a gift, and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes, and to add to other peoples store of it.Collection: Promise
Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope.Collection: Inspirational
Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.Collection: Words Of Wisdom
There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.Collection: Happiness
We must scrunch or be scrunched.Collection: Action
When you drink of the water, don't forget the spring from which it flows.Collection: Spring
Both Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa had a superstition, however, that he would have declared his passion, if he had not been cut short in his youth (at about sixty) by over-drinking his constitution, and over-doing an attempt to set it right again by swilling Bath water.Collection: Funny
Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, vhen you an't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant.Collection: Games
By the by, who ever knew a man who never read or wrote neither who hadn't got some small back parlour which he would call a study!Collection: Men
I don't suppose there's a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There's youth to the amount of eight hundredpound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I'd take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get 'em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among 'em as nothing should equal it!Collection: Men