40 Best A Christmas Carol Quotes by Charles Dickens

Get in the spirit of the season with the best A Christmas Carol quotes from the beloved Charles Dickens Christmas short story. As you deck the halls and trim the tree, celebrate the holiday with these timeless insights and sentiments about the true meaning of Christmas.

These quotes are perfect reflections for holiday toasts, card messages, or moments of quiet contemplation by the fireside. So, let the spirits of Christmases past, present, and future speak to you through Dickens’ immortal words.

A Christmas Carol is a literary classic book about the Christmas spirit — a story of redemption where the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, through ghostly interventions, learns the true meaning of Christmas and transforms into a kinder, more generous person.

It’s exquisitely crafted in both word and message, inspiring generations of readers. It’s a short and easy classic book and, trust me, it’s worthy of reading each holiday season. It’s one of the best holiday books of all time, but even if you don’t read or re-read the entire book this year, the A Christmas Carol quotes below are sure to remind you of the reason for the season.

More of the Best A Christmas Carol Quotes

Below are even more quotes from A Christmas Carol, which I have arranged in an order that showcases Scrooge’s transformation at the heart of the story for you:

“I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.”

“Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

“If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

“Christmas is a poor excuse every 25th of December to pick a man’s pockets.”

“External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.”

“‘Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'”

“Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

“I was only going to say,” said Scrooge’s nephew, “that the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant moments, which could do him no harm.”

“‘Come, then,’ returned the nephew gaily. ‘What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.'”

“It is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too.”

“What is the point of having all that money if you are never going to enjoy it?”

“No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.”

“‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!'”

“There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

“It is required of every man,” the ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.”

“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.”

“You fear the world too much,’ she answered gently. ‘All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off, one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

“Money can’t buy a happy life, or a peaceful death.”

“No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.”

“There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being waterproof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker’s. But, they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time.”

“Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s misused opportunities!”

“There are many things which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited.”

“At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.”

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”

“He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness.”

“He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

“He was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares, long, long, forgotten.”

“Christmas, and the end of the year, is definitely a time when people try their hardest to begin afresh, a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.”

“In short, I should have liked to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet be man enough to know its value.”

“‘I don’t know what to do!’ cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings. ‘I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!'”

“His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”

“Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!”

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”