Charles Dickens

"Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some."

"There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text of the learned doctor."

"The most important thing is the mission; everything else will follow."

"Even the smallest person can change the course of the future."

"Love is a great beautifier."

"Cheerfulness and contentment are great beautifiers and are famous preservers of youthful looks."

"It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the whole system."

"An habitual victim of this compound had told him that the more he drank the more he wanted to drink."

"The various pursuits of life have divided us into a thousand different creatures."

"Pleasure and pain are the only springs of action in the human heart."

"It is not the coat that makes the gentleman, but the manners."

"Every man has as much right to what he has earned as you have to what you have earned."

"The civilized world has always been governed by the same feelings that govern the savage."

"A loving heart is the truest wisdom."

"There is nothing so strong or safe in an uncertain world as the simple truth."

"Generosity is not in giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is in giving me that which you need more than I do."

"The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists."

"There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart."

"As to the mode of education, I would raise the development of the body to be coordinate with the training of the intellect."

"The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it."

"A man of the name of Bagnet, a perfect man of business, had never been known to lose his temper or his turn."

"It is a measure of society by the way it treats its weakest members."

"Some men's skins are so tough that their nerves cannot be reached at all."

"There is always something to do, and if there isn't, there is always something to undo."

"I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the fact is mine."

"The fog comes in like the ghost of something that has been and cannot be again."

"Stars emerge from the night as hope emerges from darkness."

"The real Christmas comes into the heart."

"All the world is grist to the mill of the wise man."

"Life has taught me this: you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who truly understand you."