Wilkie Collins : The Law And The Lady
This is the third novel, written by Wilkie Collins, read by me after The Moonstone & The Lady in White. Though this too is a detective novel, I have come across few aphorisms which I though I should write down, before I give away the book to charity.
- Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.
- 'Go where you may', I said, 'I go with you! Friends - reputation - I care nothing who I lose, or what I lose.
- It is not easy to help you to understand a woman who doesn't understand herself.
- Women alone can estimate what it cost me to be silent. And men alone can understand how irritating my silence must have been to my husband.
- I thought I had married a woman who was superior to the vulgar failings of her sex. A good wife should know better than to pry into affairs of her husband's with which she has no concern.
- Women, children and dogs proverbially know by instinct who the people are who really like them.
- ..the lights and shadows of married life...
- Of all the follies that a man can commit, the greatest is acting on impulse.
- Why, my charming friend, profane your lips by talking of such things? Why frighten away the Loves and the Graces that lie hid in your smile?
- Like a good woman - you make a hero of the man you love, whether he deserves it or not.
- ...like all weak people, headstrong and unreasonable to the last degree !
- ..you are confusing a delicate-minded man with a weak-minded man.
- What a grand thing it is to be young !!
- Music is the true narcotic for excitable brains. My harp ! my harp !
- Well said the wisdom of our ancestors - there are none so blind as those who won't see !
- Women wisely compose their minds, and help themselves to think quietly, by doing needlework. Why are men such fools as to deny themselves the same admirable resource - the simple and soothing occupation which keeps the nerves steady and leaves the mind calm and free?
- There are some men whom the women all like; and there are other men whom the women never care for. Without the least reason for it in either case, though the one man is just as good as the other.
- Ladies are not generally in the habit of troubling their heads about dry questions of law.
- Women are infinitely superior to men in the moral qualities which are the true adornments of humanity.
- Public opinion looks at the institution of 'The Sabbath' in Scotland; finds it unparalleled in Christendom for its senseless and savage austerity; sees a nation content to be deprived by its priesthood of every social privilege on one day in every week - forbidden to travel, forbidden to telegraph; forbidden to eat a hot dinner; forbidden to read a newspaper; in short, allowed the use of two liberties only, the liberty of exhibiting oneself at the Church, and the liberty of secluding oneself over the bottle - public opinion sees this, and arrives at the not unreasonable conclusion that the people who submit to such social laws as these are the most stolid, stern, and joyless people on the face of the earth.
- What is bred in the bone, will never come out of the flesh.
- The greatest scoundrel living always has a friend - in a woman, or a dog.
- Time has got all the credit of being the great consoler of afflicted mortals. In my opinion, Time has been over-rated in this matter. Distance does the same beneficent work, far more speedily, and (when assisted by Change) far more effectually as well.
- You will see that benevolence towards everybody is the great virtue of the time we live in.
- Come, come, march with the age ! Open your mind to the new ideas !
- We were all monkeys before we were men, and molecules before we were monkeys !
- Is there a common fund of wickedness in us all ?
- The greatest difficulties give way in the end, when they are attacked by the united alliance of patience, resolution, - and economy.
- The vainest women were always the ugly women.
- It's a great advantage to marry an old man - you can twist him round your little finger.
- When a women sells herself to a man, the vile bargain is none the less infamous (to my mind),because it happens to be made under the sanction of the Church and the Law.
No comments:
Post a Comment