Wilkie Collins Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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