If you’re looking for the best Bleak House quotes you’ve come to the right place. We compiled a list of 27 quotes that best summarise the message of Charles Dickens in Bleak House. Let these quotes inspire you!
Bleak House Quotes
He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this same miry afternoon.… There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Woodcourt: “Miss Summerson, ” said Mr. Woodcourt, “if without obtruding myself on your confidence I may remain near you, pray let me do so.”Esther: “You are truly kind, ” I answered. “I need wish to keep no secret of my own from you; if I keep any, it is another’s.”Woodcourt: “I quite understand. Trust me, I will remain near you only so long as I can fully respect it.”Esther: “I trust implicitly to you, ” I said, “I know and deeply feel how sacredly you keep your promise.” – pg.807
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed wife?””She’s gone forrard to the Police Office, ” returns Mr Bucket. “You’ll see her there, my dear.””I would like to kiss her!” exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting tigress-like. “You’d bite her, I suspect, ” says Mr Bucket.”I would!” making her eyes very large. “I would love to tear her, limb from limb.””Bless you, darling, ” says Mr Bucket, with the greatest composure; “I’m fully prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising animosity against one another, when you do differ.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men’s sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
We went our several ways, ” said Lady Dedlock, “and had little in common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I suppose, but it could not be helped.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
He had been educated in no habits of application and concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks, always with fair credit and often with distinction, but in a fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They were good qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously won, but like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were very bad masters. If they had been under Richard’s direction, they would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction, they became his enemies.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
They meet again at dinner–again, next day– again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly but of place and yet so perfectly at home. They appear to take as little note of one another as any two people enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows–all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
[S]ome score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be — as here they are — mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces ….
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
A word in earnest is as good as a speech
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
I never heard that it had been anybody’s business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection. I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken!
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned — would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite … Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families … and you have no idea … what games goes on!
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as lambs in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it, if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I’m a child, ‘ you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person’s number, and it’s Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way, when it goes round a company, but I’m a practical one, and that’s my experience. So’s this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
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