Quotes to inspire and reflect

‘It’s always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.’ ‘But suppose there are two mobs?’ suggested Mr Snodgrass. ‘Shout with the largest,’ replied Mr Pickwick.

I wants to make your flesh creep.

He had used the word in its Pickwickian sense … He had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view.

Kent, sir—everybody knows Kent—apples, cherries, hops, and women.

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr Bumble … ‘the law is a ass—a idiot.’

Please, sir, I want some more. Oliver

Known by the sobriquet of ‘The artful Dodger’.

Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.

All is gas and gaiters.

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.

Subdue your appetites my dears, and you’ve conquered human natur.

Here’s the rule for bargains: ‘Do other men, for they would do you.’

He’d make a lovely corpse.

The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism.

Affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving— HOW NOT TO DO IT.

There’s milestones on the Dover Road!

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Now, what I want is, Facts … Facts alone are wanted in life.

‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy,’ said Estella with disdain, before our first game was out.

What larks.

When found, make a note of.

What the waves were always saying.

Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.

It was as true … as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them.

I only ask for information.

We are so very ’umble.

Barkis is willin’.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.

I am a lone lorn creetur … and everythink goes contrairy with me.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perennially hopeless.

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

Je pense, donc je suis.

It is contrary to reason to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.

For it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.

There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. review of the Works of Pope (1847 ed.) in North British Review August 1848, vol. 9

Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

Murder considered as one of the fine arts.

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!

A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.

When asked what was first in oratory, [he] replied to his questioner, ‘action,’ what second, ‘action,’ and again third, ‘action’.

By convention there is colour, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space.