Charles Dickens

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is a far, far better thing that I do now, then I have ever done before... it is a far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known before.

With affection beaming out of one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.

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.

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.

We need never be ashamed of our tears.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

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.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time. A kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. The only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.