Wilkie Collins Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

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

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

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.

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.

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

I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.

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

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.

I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house ; but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

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

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

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

You musn't talk of a young lady *belonging* to anybody, as if she was a piece of furniture, or money in the Three per Cent, or something of that sort.