My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.
~
David Copperfield
by
Charles Dickens
"It's in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present."
~
David Copperfield
by
Charles Dickens
"Lord bless you!" said Mr. Omer, resuming his pipe, "a man must take the fat with the lean; that's what he must make up his mind to, in this life. "
~
David Copperfield
by
Charles Dickens
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
~
David Copperfield
by
Charles Dickens
"Nobody can spoil a life, my dear. That's nonsense. Things happen, but we bob up."
~
The Forsyte Saga
by
John Galsworthy
"Do you know anything on earth which has not a dangerous side if it is mishandled and exaggerated? "
~
The Land of Mist
by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is always the unusual which alarms.
~
The Forsyte Saga
by
John Galsworthy
"One gets a bad habit of being unhappy."
~
The Mill on the Floss
by
George Eliot
Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.
~
The Mill on the Floss
by
George Eliot
Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.
~
Nicholas Nickleby
by
Charles Dickens