Charles Dickens

Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.

Constancy in love is a good thing; but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort.

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.

Grief never mended no broken bones.

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.

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

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.