The sentence appears nowhere in Dickens’s published writing. A full-text search of 39 Dickens texts on Project Gutenberg — every novel, the Christmas books, the travel writing, the collected Speeches and three volumes of Letters — returns no instance of the phrase “wasted on others.” The earliest printing I could locate is a bare, sourceless entry in Rev. James Wood’s Dictionary of Quotations ↗ of 1893, where it is tagged only “Dickens.”
“A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self” Unverified. "A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self" is credited to Charles Dickens but appears in none of his novels, letters or speeches. Its earliest located printing is Rev. James Wood, comp., Dictionary of Quotations (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1893), p. 4, where it is tagged only "Dickens" — with no work named. Via Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Charles Dickens. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the themes of kindness, purpose and time. Theme: "A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
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Provenance
The earliest printing anyone can point to
Earliest located printing
Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources
Compiler and imprint
Rev. James Wood · London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1893 · page 4
Credit given there
“Dickens.” — surname only. No work, no year, no context.
In Dickens’s own writing
Not found. 39 Dickens texts searched; zero occurrences of “wasted on others.”
A day may sink or save a realm. Tennyson. A day of grace (Gunst) is as a day in harvest; one must be diligent as soon as it is ripe. Goethe. A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.Dickens.Wood, Dictionary of Quotations (1893), p. 4
This is the whole of the “context” that exists. Wood’s entries are alphabetical by first word and carry nothing but an italicised name — the Dickens line sits between a Tennyson and a Goethe, all three tagged identically. A surname in that position is a filing label, not a citation.
Searched Quote Investigator and the sourced sections of Wikiquote first. Neither has investigated this line; the Wikiquote Dickens page ↗ does not list it among his sourced or misattributed quotations at all.
Ran a full-text search for “wasted on others” across 39 Dickens texts on Project Gutenberg — every novel, the Christmas books, American Notes, Pictures from Italy, Sketches by Boz, The Uncommercial Traveller, the collected Speeches and three volumes of Letters. Zero matches. That includes A Tale of Two Cities ↗, the book Goodreads names.
Traced the credit back to Rev. James Wood’s Dictionary of Quotations ↗ (1893), which prints the line twice — on page 4 as “A day wasted…” and later in the volume as “The day wasted…” — both tagged only “Dickens.”
Confirmed the dates: Dickens died 9 June 1870 per his biographical record ↗, twenty-three years before Wood’s dictionary was published. No earlier printing surfaced in an Internet Archive full-text search.
✓Public domain
This is a rights judgement, not an attribution one. Whoever actually wrote the sentence, it was in print by 1893 in Wood’s Dictionary of Quotations (London: Frederick Warne and Co.) — well before the 1931 cutoff — so the wording is in the public domain in the United States. Its authorship remains unestablished; public-domain status here means the text is free to reproduce, not that the Dickens credit is sound.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How the credit got built
Nobody forged this line. It was passed along by compilers and databases that each added a little more confidence than the last — until a bare surname in a Victorian reference book had turned into a chapter-and-verse citation.
✕
The origin of the creditRev. James Wood, 1893 Compiler shorthand
Wood’s Dictionary of Quotations ↗ prints the line on page 4 and tags it “Dickens.” No work, no year, no context. Every one of the thirty-seven Dickens entries in the volume is tagged the same way, so the name is a filing label rather than a source.
✕
The invented bookGoodreads — “A Tale of Two Cities” Demonstrably wrong
The vetted Wikiquote Dickens page ↗ does not carry the line at all. It survives only on the talk page ↗ under Unsourced, where the sole citation offered — added in 2014, answering a request first made in 2009 — is Wood’s 1893 dictionary.
✓Dickens did write something close to this, and it is easy to check: “No one is useless in this world… who lightens the burden of it for any one else,” spoken by the Secretary to Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend ↗ (1864–65). If you want the Dickensian version of this thought, that is the one with a page number behind it.
Context
Why a compiler’s shorthand became a fact
Rev. James Wood’s 1893 Dictionary of Quotations was built for browsing, not for checking. Entries run alphabetically by first word, and each carries an italicised name and nothing more: Tennyson, Goethe, Emerson, Dickens. All thirty-seven Dickens entries in the volume are tagged this way — surname only, no title, no volume, no page. That was an ordinary Victorian convention. It becomes a problem only when a later century treats the tag as a citation.
Which is exactly what happened. Modern quote databases ingested compendia like Wood’s wholesale, kept the name, and dropped the caveat that there was never a source attached. Somewhere downstream the line also acquired a book: Goodreads now files it under A Tale of Two Cities, a novel whose full text contains no such sentence. The attribution has been getting more specific, and more confident, the further it travels from anything checkable.
Wood credited it to “Dickens.” He never claimed to know where Dickens said it — and neither has anyone since.
One more wrinkle: Wood printed it twice
The 1893 dictionary carries the line in two places and two forms. On page 4, under A, it reads “A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.” Later in the same volume, under T, it appears as “The day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.” Both are credited simply to Dickens.
A compiler duplicating an entry under two opening words is unremarkable. But the variation is a small reminder of what kind of text this is: a saying being passed around and lightly reworded, not a sentence transcribed from a book that someone had open in front of them.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Charles Dickens was the defining novelist of the Victorian era, author of Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations. He wrote an enormous amount — fifteen novels, hundreds of essays and sketches, a lifetime of speeches and letters — and almost all of it is digitised and searchable, which is precisely why a sentence that appears in none of it is telling. Dickens did write a real and closely related line, in Our Mutual Friend: “No one is useless in this world… who lightens the burden of it for any one else.” That one is on the page. This one is not.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Earliest located printing: Rev. James Wood, comp., Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1893), 4 — where the line is credited only to “Dickens,” with no work, date or context named. No corresponding passage has been found in Dickens’s own writings.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-day-wasted-on-others-is-not-wasted-on-ones-self/