Quote collection
1K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Ven you read the speeches in the papers, and see as vun gen'lman says of another, 'the Honourable member, if he vill allow me to call him so' you vill understand, sir, that that means, 'if he vill allow me to keep up that 'ere pleasant and uniwersal fiction.'"
"On summer evenings, when every flower, and tree, and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I have in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown, have been violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair as a purification for the Temple, and have then been carried off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite steamed out of me"
""I go so far as to say, miss, morehover," proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with a most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit-"and let my words be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself-that wot my opinions respectin' flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping at the present time.""
"... As to sleep, you know, I never sleep now. I might be a Watchman, except that I don't get any pay, and he's got nothing on his mind."
"Man is but mortal: and there is a point beyond which human courage cannot extend. Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant on the advancing mass, and then fairly turned his back and-we will not say fled; firstly, because it is an ignoble term, and, secondly, because Mr. Pickwick's figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat-he trotted away, at as quick a rate as his legs would convey him;."
"Dumb as a drum vith a hole in it, sir."
"" ... It is not my desire to wound the feelings of any person with whom I am connected in family bonds. I may be a hypocrite," said Mr. Pecksniff, cuttingly, "but I am not a brute.""
""We will wait," answered little Alice, taking Nettie's hand in hers, and looking up to the sky, "we will wait - ever constant and true - till the times have got so changed as that everything helps us out, and nothing makes us ridiculous, and the fairies have come back. We will wait - ever constant and true - till we are eighty, ninety, or one hundred. And then the fairies will send US children, and we will help them out, poor pretty little creatures, if they pretend ever so much.""
"... she indulged in melancholy - that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries."
"I admire machinery as much is any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true."
"She was truest to them in the season of trial, as all the quietly loyal and good will always be."
"Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!"
"I recollected one story there was in the village, how that on a certain night in the year (it might be that very night for anything I knew), all the dead people came out of the ground and sat at the heads of their own graves till morning."
"How many young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes of rheumatic watchmen!"
"Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation."
""Do not repine, my friends," said Mr. Pecksniff, tenderly. "Do not weep for me. It is chronic.""
""Why, I don't exactly know about perjury, my dear sir," replied the little gentleman. "Harsh word, my dear sir, very harsh word indeed. It's a legal fiction, my dear sir, nothing more.""
"The bearings of this observation lays in the application of it."
"Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!"
"I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled."