Wilkie Collins
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.Collection: Patience
Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.Collection: Peace
It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
Well may your heart believe the truths I tell; 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.
The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
The law will argue any thing, with any body who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time.
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.Collection: Giants
My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.Collection: Past
The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!Collection: Book
It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.Collection: Silly
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.Collection: Men
The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Wise
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.Collection: Fiction
We neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.Collection: Judging
Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.Collection: Tonight
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.Collection: Wine
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Christian
Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.Collection: Sat
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.Collection: Successful
I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!Collection: Men
Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.Collection: Vanity
But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?Collection: Fall
Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.Collection: Husband
Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Lakes
And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.Collection: Heaven
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?Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.Collection: House
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Children
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?Collection: Book
Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.Collection: Beautiful
But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought themCollection: Clever
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.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Age
I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Reading