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Charles Dickens Quotes (1812-1870)
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About Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens, FRSA (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was the foremost English novelist of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner. Charles Dickens was trying to ban workhouses his whole career.
Best Charles Dickens Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Charles Dickens quotes.
“Money and goods are certainly the best of references.”
“The bearings of this observation lays in the application on it.”
“Professionally he declines and falls, and as a friend he drops into poetry.”
“Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.”
“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.”
“If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is.”
Charles Dickens Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Charles Dickens quotes by topic.
Charles Dickens on Christmas 10 quotes
“A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!”
Charles Dickens on Law 6 quotes
“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.”
Charles Dickens on Names 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Names →Charles Dickens on Character 4 quotes
“A demd damp, moist, unpleasant body.”
Charles Dickens on Friendship 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Friendship →Charles Dickens on Life 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Life →Charles Dickens on Love 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Love →Charles Dickens on Will (philosophy) 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Will (philosophy) →Charles Dickens on Truth 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Truth →Charles Dickens on Merriment 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Merriment →Charles Dickens on Hunger 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Hunger →Charles Dickens on Oysters 2 quotes
“Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”
What Charles Dickens Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Charles Dickens shared regarding contemporaries.
Charles Dickens on Peter Heylin 5 quotes
“Concerning rivers, we find a scientific opinion which we fear will not pass muster with the learned of our own times. It appears that rivers are "engendered in the hollow concavities of the earth," and are derived from congealed air: to give us a lively idea of which engendering, Peter informs us that it is in the same manner "as we see the aire in winter nights to be melted into a pearlie dew, sticking on our glasse windowes."”
Charles Dickens on Women 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Women →Charles Dickens on Kenneth Rexroth 2 quotes
“Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.”
Charles Dickens on Elizabeth Gaskell 2 quotes
“Let me congratulate you on the conclusion of your story [North and South]; not because it is the end of a task to which you had conceived a dislike (for I imagine you to have got the better of that delusion by this time), but because it is the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour. It seems to me that you have felt the ground thoroughly firm under your feet, and have strided on with a force and purpose that MUST now give you pleasure.”
Charles Dickens on Adah Isaacs Menken
“She is a sensitive poet who, unfortunately, cannot write.”
Charles Dickens on Joseph Foullon de Doué
Charles Dickens on Thomas Robert Malthus
“"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?" The bell struck twelve.”
Charles Dickens on Cicero
“If I could have known Cicero, and been his friend, and talked with him in his retirement at Tusculum (beau-ti-ful Tusculum l), I could have died contented.”
Charles Dickens on Wilkie Collins
“He is very suggestive, and exceeding quick to take my notions. Being industrious and reliable besides, I don't think we should be at an additional expense of £20 in the year...”
Charles Dickens on William Shakespeare
“'I'm always ill after Shakespeare,' said Mrs Wititterly. 'I scarcely exist the next day; I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakespeare is such a delicious creature.'”
Charles Dickens on James Burnett, Lord Monboddo
“It may be safely asserted, and yet without implying any direct participation in the Monboddo doctrine touching the probability of the human race having once been monkeys, that men do play very strange and extraordinary tricks.”
Charles Dickens on Wives
Quotes About Charles Dickens
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Charles Dickens from others.
Stacey Abrams on Charles Dickens
“Colson Whitehead, Charles Dickens and Octavia Butler — fascinating writers who carved out their own dominions in literature and who, in wholly unique fashion, changed writing for the rest of us.”
Peter Ackroyd on Charles Dickens
“He had a fear of the dead, and of all inanimate things, rising up around him to claim him; it is the fear of the pre-eminently solitary child and solitary man.”
Kingsley Amis on Charles Dickens
“My own experience in reading Dickens...is to be bounced between violent admiration and violent distaste almost every couple of paragraphs, and this is too uncomfortable a condition to be much alleviated by an inward recital of one's duty not to be fastidious, to gulp the stuff down in gobbets like a man.”
Walter Bagehot on Charles Dickens 2 quotes
“There is no contemporary English writer whose works are read so generally through the whole house, who can give pleasure to the servants as well as to the mistress, to the children as well as to the master.”
James Baldwin on Charles Dickens 2 quotes
“When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech — and something of Dickens' love for bravura — have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.)”
Arnold Bennett on Charles Dickens
“Of Dickens, dear friend, I know nothing. About a year ago, from idle curiousity, I picked up The Old Curiousity Shop, & of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing...! Worse than George Eliot's. If a novelist can't write, where is the beggar?”
Robert Buchanan on Charles Dickens
“Dickens is greatest when most personal and lyrical, and... he is most lyrical when he puts himself in a child's place, and sees with a child's eyes. In the centre of his best stories sits a little human figure, dreaming, watching life as it might watch the faces in the fire.”
Lord David Cecil on Charles Dickens
G. K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens 10 quotes
“Dickens was personal in a more godlike sense; he could multiply persons. He could create all the farce and tragedy of his age over again, with creatures unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not been achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle, the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the rush of that unreal army.”
Bret Harte on Charles Dickens
“And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreaths entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, This spray of Western pine!”
Aldous Huxley. Collected Essays. Vulgarity on Charles Dickens
“One of Dickens’s most striking peculiarities is that, whenever in his writing he becomes emotional, he ceases instantly to use his intelligence. The overflowing of his heart drowns his head and even dims his eyes; for, whenever he is in the melting mood, Dickens ceases to be able and probably ceases even to wish to see reality. His one and only desire on these occasions is just to overflow, nothing else. Which he does, with a vengeance and in an atrocious blank verse that is meant to be poetical prose and succeeds only in being the worst kind of fustian... Mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky overflowings of his heart, Dickens was incapable, when moved, of recreating, in terms of art, the reality which had moved him, was even, it would seem, unable to perceive that reality.”
Henry James on Charles Dickens
“The greatest of superficial novelists... It were, in our opinion, an offense against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists.”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Charles Dickens
“"Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all--as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens."”
About Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens, FRSA (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was the foremost English novelist of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner. Charles Dickens was trying to ban workhouses his whole career.