Top 160 Wilkie Collins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”

— Wilkie Collins

2. “Silence is safe.”

— Wilkie Collins

3. “I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard and shows the bare bones beneath.”

— Wilkie Collins

4. “Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.”

— Wilkie Collins

5. “Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.”

— Wilkie Collins

6. “I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!”

— Wilkie Collins

7. “It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.”

— Wilkie Collins

8. “I am an average good Christian, when you don’t push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you – which is a great comfort – are, in this respect, much the same as I am.”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

11. “Think of me pretending to be a lawyer, and not knowing how to look low enough!”

— Wilkie Collins

12. “The books – the generous friends who met me without suspicion – the merciful masters who never used me ill!”

— Wilkie Collins

13. “One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas.”

— Wilkie Collins

14. “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.”

— Wilkie Collins

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15. “Nothing in the world is hidden forever.”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

17. “No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.”

— Wilkie Collins

18. “The best men are not consistent in good – why should the worst men be consistent in evil.”

— Wilkie Collins

19. “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”

— Wilkie Collins

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

20. “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

21. “Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.”

— Wilkie Collins

22. “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

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

— Wilkie Collins

24. “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

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

— Wilkie Collins

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Wilkie Collins

27. “The ruling idea of his life appeared to be, that he was bound to show his gratitude to the country which had afforded him an asylum and a means of subsistence by doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman.”

— Wilkie Collins

28. “No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace – they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship – they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

30. “If I only had the privileges of a man, I would order out Sir Percival’s best horse instantly, and tear away on a night-gallop, eastward, to meet the rising sun – a long, hard, heavy, ceaseless gallop of hours and hours, like the famous highwayman’s ride to York. Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-keeper’s opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.”

— Wilkie Collins

31. “The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother’s cottage.”

— Wilkie Collins

32. “Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted – never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache.”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

34. “Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-keeper’s opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.”

— Wilkie Collins

35. “We had our breakfasts – whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.”

— Wilkie Collins

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

41. “In my youth, I should have chafed and fretted under the irritation of my own unreasonable state of mind. In my age, I knew better, and went out philosophically to walk it off.”

— Wilkie Collins

42. “The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.”

— Wilkie Collins

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43. “And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.”

— Wilkie Collins

44. “It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don’t understand.”

— Wilkie Collins

45. “But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

47. “The fool’s crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man’s crime is the crime that is not found out.”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

49. “The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet, came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves, too, whirled away by the wind like the rest. Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from me. Would other men have remembered that in my place? Not if they loved her as I did.”

— Wilkie Collins

50. “Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed – but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?”

— Wilkie Collins