Source identified1
“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
Tears are treated as an honest human response rather than evidence of weakness or failure of self-control.
Source note: Great Expectations, Chapter 19.
Great Expectations Quotes by Charles Dickens: Context & Meanings
4 quotations linked to Great Expectations by or associated with Charles Dickens, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
About this source
Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel narrated retrospectively by Pip
Topics and ideas
Ambition, shame, class, gratitude, regret, loyalty, self-knowledge and the moral reinterpretation of earlier choices.
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Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
Represented passages
4 quotations with source context and meaning
Source identified2
“I knew it was much to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped.”
Pip recognizes that his changed ambitions separated him from a simpler life he now sees could have been better, yet he also acknowledges that the lost path cannot simply be restored by wishing.
Source note: Great Expectations, Project Gutenberg #1400. Pip says this to Biddy after admitting that settling at the forge with Joe—and perhaps eventually with Biddy—might have made him a different and better-satisfied person. The line is Pip’s fictional first-person speech.
Source identified3
“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
Appearances are weak evidence; better judgment comes from examining what can actually be supported.
Source note: Great Expectations; Jaggers advises Pip.
Source identified4
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be.”
Pain can deepen understanding of another person when it breaks through earlier self-absorption and makes similar suffering imaginable.
Source note: Great Expectations, Chapter 59.