Charles Dickens · 288 pages
Rating: (32.6K votes)
“Reflect upon your present blessings -- of which every man has many -- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when the Great Creator was a child himself.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“Besides, the kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It wouldn't allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it wouldn't hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it would lean forward with a drunken air and dribble, a very Idiot of a kettle, on the hearth. It was quarrelsome, and hissed and spluttered morosely at the fire. To sum up all, the lid, resisting Mrs. Peerybingle's fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvey, and then with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause, dived sideways in - down to the very bottom of the kettle. And the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous resistance to coming out of the water, which the lid of that kettle employed against Mrs. Peerybingle, before she got it up again.
It looked sullen and pig-headed enough, even then: carrying its handle with an air of defiance, and cocking its spout pertly and mockingly at Mrs. Peerybingle as if it said, "I won't boil. Nothing shall induce me!”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough. Come then, returned the nephew gaily. What right have you to be morose? You're rich enough.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don't dance while you are at it.
But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking-plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“How much longer can I be so fucking cute?”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken in most instances such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“... I have always thought of Christmas-time... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“«Natale una fesseria, zio?», disse il nipote di Scrooge; «sono sicuro che non pensi una cosa simile».
«Certo che la penso», disse Scrooge. «Buon Natale! Che diritto hai tu di essere allegro? Che ragione hai tu di essere allegro? Sei povero abbastanza».
«Andiamo, via», rispose allegro il nipote. «Che diritto hai tu di essere triste? Che ragione hai tu di essere scontento? Sei ricco abbastanza».”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“«Ci sono molte cose, credo, che possono avermi fatto del bene senza che io ne abbia ricavato un profitto», replicò il nipote, «e Natale è una di queste. Ma sono sicuro che ho sempre considerato il periodo natalizio, quando è venuto — a prescindere dalla venerazione dovuta al suo nome e alla sua origine sacra, ammesso che qualcosa che si riferisca possa esser tenuta separata da questa venerazione — come buono; un periodo di gentilezza, di perdono, di carità, di gioia; l'unico periodo che io conosca, in tutto il lungo calendario di un anno, nel quale uomini e donne sembrano concordi nello schiudere liberamente i cuori serrati e nel pensare alla gente che è al disotto di loro come se si trattasse realmente di compagni nel viaggio verso la tomba, e non di un'altra razza di creature in viaggio verso altre mete. E per questo, zio, anche se il Natale non mi ha mai fatto entrare in tasca una moneta d'oro, e neanche d'argento, credo che mi abbia fatto bene e che mi farà bene, e chiedo che Dio lo benedica».”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” Which all the family re-echoed. “God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“... Within the mind, especially the mind under great stress... boundaries of space and time are meaningless, and the... interior self lives by other rules and in other dimensions.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“En nuestro fuero interno, medimos el tiempo por los cambios y los acontecimientos, no por los años.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up; what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“Take warning of the consequences of being nobody's enemy but your own.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“... Any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness!”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
“This is who I am. I am loving but wounded, and I need someone to take me as I am.”
― Luis Carlos Montalván, quote from Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him
“The question of whether or not there is a God or Truth or Reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosphers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know your self. Immaturity lies in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Freedom from the Known
“Kiddo, you and me don't do so well in situations we can't control.'
'Don't think I care for that.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink
“I’m just saying that when there is little left to lose, the consequences of one’s actions don’t carry the same weight…painful or otherwise.”
― Amy A. Bartol, quote from Under Different Stars
“For the Arabs, and the above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed. With few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the Diaspora had come in the Spain of the caliphs, and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
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