Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.

Quotes

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
Tell Wind and Fire where to stop but don't tell me.
Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tries, and a touch that never hurts.
Spring is the time of the year, when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.
A man who could build a church, as one may say, by squinting at a sheet of paper.
Accidents will occur in the best regulated families.
I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
I do not know the American gentleman, god forgive me for putting two such words together.
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 every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its 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 its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
No man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner.
There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

Hunting
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

Money
Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.

Trees
Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.

Food, Money
It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.
So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.
It is a 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.
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.