Quotes to inspire and reflect

You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.

Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.

You know, in a general way, what being a reference means. A person who can’t pay, gets another person who can’t pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that he has got two natural legs.

There is a wisdom of the Head, and . . . a wisdom of the Heart.

I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced had no existence.

I expect a Judgment. On the day of Judgment.

I call them [Miss Flite’s birds] the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!

“Not to put too fine a point upon it”—a favorite apology for plain-speaking with Mr Snagsby.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!

“She is the child of the universe.” “The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”

This is a London particular. . . . A fog, miss.

Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. . . . The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.

Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here [to the Court of Chancery]!

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.

There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century, and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs.

Fog everywhere. . . . The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

A man must take the fat with the lean.

Trifles make the sum of life.

It’s only my child-wife.

Circumstances beyond my individual control.

“People can’t die, along the coast,” said Mr. Peggotty, “except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood. He’s a going out with the tide.”

A long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether.

Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!

Nobody’s enemy but his own.

What a world of gammon and spinnage it is, though, ain’t it!

The mistake was made of putting some of the trouble out of King Charles’s head into my head.

[ Uriah Heep speaking :] I’m a very umble person.

It’s a mad world. Mad as Bedlam.

I have known him [Mr. Micawber] to come home to supper with a flood of tears, and a declaration that nothing was now left but a jail; and go to bed making a calculation of the expense of putting bow-windows to the house, “in case anything turned up,” which was his favorite expression.

I never will desert Mr. Micawber.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

“Wal’r, my boy,” replied the Captain, “in the Proverbs of Solomon you will find the following words, ‘May we never want a friend in need, nor a bottle to give him!’ When found, make a note of.”

Keep up appearances whatever you do.

“Bother Mrs. Harris!” said Betsey Prig. . . . “I don’t believe there’s no sich a person!”

It was a turkey! He could never have stood upon his legs, that bird! He would have snapped ’em off short in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

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

[ Of Tiny Tim :] As good as gold.

“I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?” said Scrooge.

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,” said the Spirit. “Look upon me!”

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” “Long Past?” inquired Scrooge. . . . “No. Your past.”

[ Jacob Marley’s ghost speaking :] I wear the chain I forged in life.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.

It was a maxim with Foxey—our revered father, gentlemen—“Always suspect everybody.”

Codlin’s the friend, not Short.

“Did you ever taste beer?” “I had a sip of it once,” said the small servant. “Here’s a state of things!” cried Mr. Swiveller. . . . “She never tasted it—it can’t be tasted in a sip!”