Wilkie Collins Quotes - Page 2

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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 am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.