Best Charles Dickens Quotes from Selected Works with Chapter Numbers

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was born in Portsmouth, England, and sent to work in a shoeblacking factory at the age of twelve when his father was thrown into debtor's prison. This emotionally devastating experience inspired Dickens's lifelong sympathy for the poor and the working class. He began publishing fiction in 1834, and the serialization of his work in periodicals became so popular that by the time his novel Oliver Twist was published in 1838, he was a bestselling writer. Over the next thirty years he produced a wide variety of stories, sketches, and travel writings. Through the publication of A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861), and other works, Dickens became known for his portraits of everyday Victorian people, his compassion for the underclass, and his dedication to using fiction as a tool for social reform. (Bio from Fall River Press publication of Great Expectations and other classic novels.)

Oliver Twist

• The blessing was from a young child's lips, but it was the first that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles and sufferings, and troubles and changes, of his after life, he never once forgot it.
• Chapter 7

• There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate. 
• Chapter 9

• There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
• Chapter 14

• The persons on whom I have bestowed my dearest love, lie deep in their graves; but although the happiness and delight of my life lie buried there too, I have no made a coffin of my heart, and sealed it up, forever, on my best affections. Deep affliction has but strengthened and refined them. 
• Chapter 14

• The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shows in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven, and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.
• Chapter 19

• Women can always put things in fewest words.--Except when it's blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.
• Chapter 20

• The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known. Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall. 
• Chapter 30

• Oh! the suspense, the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance! Oh! the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces: what tortures can equal these; what reflections or endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them!
• Chapter 33

• We need to be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done--of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.
• Chapter 33

• I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can offer. I know that the devotion and affection of her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and lasting.
• Chapter 34

• My heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind.
• Chapter 34

• It is because I think so much of warm and sensitive hearts, that I would spare them from being wounded.
• Chapter 34

• Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellowmen, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.
• Chapter 34

• There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and, if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object; which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.
• Chapter 34

• But tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof.
• Chapter 37

• It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper. So cry away.
• Chapter 37

• "Every man's his own friend, my dear," replied Fagin, with his most insinuating grin. "He hasn't as good a one as himself anywhere." "Except sometimes," replied Morris Bolter, assuming the air of a man of the world. "Some people are nobody's enemies but their own, yer know."
• Chapter 43

• The sun--the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man--burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray. 
• Chapter 48

• "It was all Mrs. Bumbled. She would do it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking round to ascertain that his partner had left the room. "That is no excuse," replied Mr. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction." "If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass--a idiot. If that's 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 experience--by experience."
• Chapter 51

• Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in the long close embrace between the orphans be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief itself arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain. 
• Chapter 51

A Tale of Two Cities

• 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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
• Book 1 Chapter 1

• A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
• Book 1 Chapter 3

• My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
• Book 1 Chapter 3

• Yes. And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done--done, see you!--under that sky there, every day.
• Book 1 Chapter 5

• Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. 
• Book 2 Chapter 5

• Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.
• Book 2 Chapter 6

• A multitude of people, and yet a solitude.
• Book 2 Chapter 6

• I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her.
• Book 2 Chapter 10

• The cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him. 
• Book 2 Chapter 13

• I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.
• Book 2 Chapter 13

• Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
• Book 2 Chapter 13

• All through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am in, into fire--a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.
• Book 2 Chapter 13

• For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one thing. The time will come, the time will not be long in coming, when new ties will be formed about you--ties that will bind you yet more tenderly and strongly to the home you so adorn--the dearest ties that will ever grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy father's face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!
• Book 2 Chapter 13

• Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.
• Book 2 Chapter 16

• Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see the triumph.
• Book 2 Chapter 16

• Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;--the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
• Book 3 Chapter 5

• There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair.
• Book 3 Chapter 10

• Before I go, he said, and paused.-- I may kiss her? It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, "A life you love."
• Book 3 Chapter 11

• Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop, but don't tell me.
• Book 3 Chapter 12

• If you remember the words that passed between us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this when you see it. You do remember them, I know. It is not in your nature to forget them. . . . I am thankful that the time has come, when I can prove them. That I do so, in no subject for regret or grief.
• Book 3 Chapter 13

• Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression ever again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
• Book 3 Chapter 15

• I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. . . . I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy . . . I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence.
• Book 3 Chapter 15

• 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.
• Book 3 Chapter 15

Great Expectations

• Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies. 
• Chapter 2

• In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. 
• Chapter 6

• And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful if would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude. 
• Chapter 7

• 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. 
• Chapter 8

• Which this to you the true friend say. If you can't get to be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip, and live well and die happy. 
• Chapter 9

• That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. 
• Chapter 9

• Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. 
• Chapter 19

• 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. 
• Chapter 19

• So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise. 
• Chapter 27

• Life is made of ever so many partings welded together. 
• Chapter 27

• I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection. 
• Chapter 29

• Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces--and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper--lover her, love her, love her!
• Chapter 29

• I'll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter--as I did!
• Chapter 29

• I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me. 
• Chapter 38

• Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's not better rule. 
• Chapter 40

• Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since--on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there are everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!
• Chapter 44

• I stole her heart away and put ice in its place. 
• Chapter 49

• It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. 
• Chapter 54

• There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.
• Chapter 59

• And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now--now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better shape.
• Chapter 59