19 quotes
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
Charles Dickens (1906)
The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.
Charles Dickens (1906)
When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
Charles Dickens (1906)
One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.
Charles Dickens (1906)
Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague."
Charles Dickens (1906)
Cockney artists profess to find the bourgeoisie dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull.
Charles Dickens (1906)
A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.
Charles Dickens (1906)
Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.
Charles Dickens (1906)
And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.
Charles Dickens (1906)
Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.
Charles Dickens (1906)
There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Charles Dickens (1906)
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
Charles Dickens (1906)
The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of this world.
Charles Dickens (1906)
These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it.
Charles Dickens (1906)
The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.
Charles Dickens (1906)
[Dickens] was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can kill.
Charles Dickens (1906)
Round the birth of "Pickwick" broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of Dickens.... He turned people into mortal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into immortal jokes.
Charles Dickens (1906)
The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good.
Charles Dickens (1906)
For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.... It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
Charles Dickens (1906)