Wilkie Collins Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Wilkie Collins
Oh, Science, be merciful to the fanatics, and the fools!

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

Wilkie Collins
"I haven't much time to be fond of anything," says Sergeant Cuff. "But when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times... the roses get it."

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

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

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

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

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

Wilkie Collins
Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
What we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty.

Wilkie Collins
What is scientific knowledge now may be scientific ignorance in some years more.

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

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

Wilkie Collins
We were all monkeys before we were men, and molecules before we were monkeys!

Wilkie Collins
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?

Wilkie Collins
I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house ; but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit.

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

Wilkie Collins
"Facts?" he repeated. "Take a drop more grog, Mr. Franklin, and you'll get over the weakness of believing facts!" "Foul play, Sir."

Wilkie Collins
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.

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins