Best 94 quotes of Wilkie Collins on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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?

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!

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 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 am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.

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

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

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

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. I began my life among them in my father's nursery garden, and I shall end my life among them, if I can. Yes. One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

...it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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?

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.

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.

Among the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.

As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless.

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature.

But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.

But in these modern times it may be decidedly asserted as a fact, that vice, in accomplishing the vast majority of its seductions, uses no disguise at all; appears impudently in its naked deformity; and, instead of horrifying all beholders, in accordance with the prediction of the classical satirist, absolutely attracts a much more numerous congregation of worshippers than has ever yet been brought together by the divinest beauties that virtue can display for the allurement of mankind.