Top 64 Quotes & Sayings by Wilkie Collins

The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.

The law will argue any thing, with any body who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time.

I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.

Well may your heart believe the truths I tell; 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.

It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.

I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Yes! the books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.

I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong.

The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.

Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.

Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view.

Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion. If Mr. Jennings will be so very kind, I should like to be warned of the explosion this time. With a view to getting it over, if possible, before I go to bed.

I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.

Well may your heart believe the truths Well may your heart believe the truths I tell; 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.

But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them

I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.

The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.

I never paid you a compliment, Rachel, in my life. Successful love may sometimes use the language of flattery, I admit. But hopeless love, dearest, always speaks the truth.

Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.

Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.

She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.

The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!

We neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.

It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.

I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.

Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.

I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard and shows the bare bones beneath.

If I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.

There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their wine;they can't play at wist;and they can't pay a lady a compliment.

We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.

The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.

I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.

Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.

And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.

Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.

The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil.

No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.

My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.

The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.

Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm-I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience-I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca.

I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.

Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.

I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

I haven't much time to be fond of anything. But when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times the roses get it.

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.

My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it.

But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?