Quotes from Wilkie Collins

Don't let me think.

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.

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.

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

Nature's voice and Nature's beauty---God's soothing and purifying angels of the soul---speak to me most tenderly and most happily, at such times as these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

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

it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view.

In every class of society, gratitude is the rarest of all human virtues.

She was unlike most girls of her age, in this--that she had ideas of her own.

Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if only you pull it in the right way.