230 Quotes by Wilkie Collins

People in low life have no such privilege. Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on us. We learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with our duties as patiently as may be.

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

Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn’t exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you! – you have married a monster.

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.

How it was I don’t understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another’s way. When I wanted to go up-stairs, there was my wife coming down; or when my wife wanted to go down, there was I coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.

Evil report, with time and chance to help it, travels patiently, and travels far.

The most easily deteriorated of all the moral qualities is the quality called ‘conscience.’ In one state of a man’s mind, his conscience is the severest judge that can pass sentence on him. In another state, he and his conscience are on the best possible terms with each other in the comfortable capacity of accomplices.

Here is one more book that depicts the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have all felt, which we have all known.

He was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants.