Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Quotes
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.
I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.
It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by.
...and to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it
He had no notion of meeting danger half-way. When it came upon him, he confronted it, but it must come before he troubled himself.
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing compared to self-swindlers.
Apprehension of a painful or disagreeable recognition made me tremble. I am confident that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a few minutes of the terror of childhood.
My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going.
I found myself with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.
I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore – yes, I do well.
...lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, work round to the same.
It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain.
So, 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.
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.
They ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.
I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind!
He couldn't be a doctor, or he would have a quieter and more persuasive manner.
The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him.
She led me to believe we will going fast because her thoughts were going fast.
He wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.
Old Barley might be as old as thee hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to overflowing.
When I went out, light of day seemed a darker color than when I went in.
He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else at hand.
Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart.