"I made a compact with myself that..." - Quote by Charles Dickens

“Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.”

“Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.”

“Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.”

“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.”

“Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.”

“No man [or woman] is free until he learns to do his own thinking and gains the courage to act on his own personal initiative.”

“My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.”

“If I supply you with a thought, you may remember it and you may not. But if I can make you think a thought for yourself, I have indeed added to your stature.”