19th-century Novelist Quotes

Victor Hugo

Jules Verne

Agatha Christie

Rudyard Kipling

Alexandre Dumas

Virginia Woolf

G. K. Chesterton

One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

G. K. Chesterton

To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.

Agatha Christie

So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

The physician has a sacred mission on earth; and to fulfill it he begins at the source of life, and goes down to the mysterious darkness of the tomb.

Alexandre Dumas

For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.

There are times when Science does not satisfy.

Rudyard Kipling

The distance between the earth and her satellite is a mere trifle, and undeserving of serious consideration. I am convinced that before twenty years are over one-half of our earth will have paid a visit to the moon.

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Georges Courteline

I am naturally taciturn, and became a silent and attentive listener.

William Hamilton Maxwell

Oh, that in religion, as in everything else, man would judge his brother man by his own heart; and as dear, as precious as his peculiar creed may be to him, believe so it is with the faith of his brother!

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

Only virtue has powerful arguments against pessimism.

As Rose stood by him watching the ease with which he quickly brought order out of chaos, she privately resolved to hunt up her old arithmetic and perfect herself in the four first rules, with a good tug at fractions, before she read any more fairy tales.

Louisa May Alcott

Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.

Sherwood Anderson

We must go for a day in the country and when surrounded by the gay twittering of the birds and the smell of the cows I will lay my suit at her feet and he waved his arm wildly at the gay thought.

Whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.

Astronomy is certainly an alluring science; set an astronomer before a telescope, and an overwhelming attraction draws his soul away through the tube up into heaven, and leaves his body without mundane interests.

Sabine Baring-Gould

No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another

We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to know that.

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.

Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.

Georges Bernanos

Farewell to Thee! But not farewell To all my fondest thoughts of Thee; Within my heart they still shall dwell And they shall cheer and comfort me.

I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is (correcting himself), I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience.

Charlotte Brontë