Wisdom Quotes, page 131

“I am at the moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold.”

“Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues – faith and hope.”

“And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.”

“In the little world in which children have their existence, whoever brings them up finds nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”

“They are man's and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree; but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

“Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.”

“Some people are nobody's enemies but their own.”

“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”

“Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.”

“Such is hope, heaven's own gift to struggling mortals, pervading, like some subtle essence from the skies, all things both good and bad.”

“Quadruped lions are said to be savage only when they are hungry; biped lions are rarely sulky longer than when their appetite for distinction remains unappeased.”

“Poverty and oysters always seem to go together.”

“For your popular rumour, unlike the rolling stone of the proverb, is one which gathers a deal of moss in its wanderings up and down.”

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

“Pause, you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

“The civility which money will purchase is rarely extended to those who have none.”

“A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage more so.”

“Judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to bring it down one day.”

“Never say never.”

“I wear the chain I forged in life, replied the ghost. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

“He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been, in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away, by the fervour of this reproach.”

“It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.”

“To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.”

“When I have heard him talking to Papa during the sittings for the picture, I have sat wondering whether it could be that he has no belief in anybody else, because he has no belief in himself.”

“Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.”

“Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.”

“If the parks be 'the lungs of London,' we wonder what Greenwich Fair is — a periodical breaking out, we suppose — a sort of spring rash.”

“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures, hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”

“I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything.”

“In the moonlight, which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is — as the light called human life is — at its coming and its going.”