Wilkie Collins Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

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

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.

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