You don’t carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.
It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.
Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.
There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.
Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.
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.
I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.
Marley was dead: to begin with.
I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.
We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart.
It is no small thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
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.
I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disninterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her.
You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay.
There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind Junior.
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.
No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.
And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done – done, see you! – under that sky there, every day.