Famous Literary Quotes

Liberty is worth paying for...
By Jules Verne on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.
By Charles Dickens on A Christmas Carol

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning him-self to let it eat him away.
By Charles Dickens on A Tale of Two Cities

There are so many unpleasant things in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more.
By Lucy Maud Montgomery on Anne Of Avonlea

I'm not a bit changed--not really. I'm only just pruned down and branched out. The real ME--back here--is just the same.
By Lucy Maud Montgomery on Anne of Green Gables

Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life received a direct order - never, at least, without long, and sometimes tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for the request.
By Rudyard Kipling on Captains Courageous

It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?
By Bram Stoker on Dracula

We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.
By Bram Stoker on Dracula

The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no more.
By Thomas Hardy on Far From The Madding Crowd

You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you,as mine has been.
By Mary Shelley on Frankenstein

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
By Mary Shelley on Frankenstein

I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.
By Charles Dickens on Great Expectations

To be, or not to be,--that is the question:--whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.
By William Shakespeare on Hamlet

He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it!
By Joseph Conrad on Heart of Darkness

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
By E. M. Forster on Howards End

Was I to believe him in earnest in his intention to penetrate to the centre of this massive globe? Had I been listening to the mad speculations of a lunatic, or to the scientific conclusions of a lofty genius? Where did truth stop? Where did error begin?
By Jules Verne on Journey to the Center of the Earth

The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose He meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it will not be brought up against me when my clock strikes.
By H. Rider Haggard on King Solomon's Mines

Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come.
By Louisa May Alcott on Little Women

Double, double, toil and trouble; fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
By William Shakespeare on Macbeth

It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
By Wilkie Collins on Man and Wife

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?
By George Eliot on Middlemarch

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!
By George Eliot on Middlemarch

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life.
By Herman Melville on Moby Dick

Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud.
By Sophocles on Oedipus Rex

"Art," he continued, with a wave of the hand, "is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life."
By W. Somerset Maugham on Of Human Bondage

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.
By Jane Austen on Pride and Prejudice

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
By George Bernard Shaw on Pygmalion

He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing.
By Jane Austen on Sense and Sensibility

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature...
By George Eliot on Silas Marner

The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence.
By D. H. Lawrence on Sons and Lovers

It was on a bitterly cold night and frosty morning, towards the end of the winter of '97, that I was awakened by a tugging at my shoulder. It was Holmes. The candle in his hand shone upon his eager, stooping face, and told me at a glance that something was amiss.
By Arthur Conan Doyle on The Adventure of Abbey Grange

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
By Mark Twain on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill--all this was Buck's, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.
By Jack London on The Call of the Wild

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
By Oscar Wilde on The Importance of Being Earnest

Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?
By James Fenimore Cooper on The Last of the Mohicans

On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!--but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!
By Washington Irving on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

And the matches gave such a brilliant light that it was brighter than at noon-day: never formerly had the grandmother been so beautiful and so tall. She took the little maiden, on her arm, and both flew in brightness and in joy so high, so very high, and then above was neither cold, nor hunger, nor anxiety--they were with God.
By Hans Christian Andersen on The Little Match Girl

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
By P. G. Wodehouse on The Man Upstairs

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
By W. Somerset Maugham on The Moon and Sixpence

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
By Edgar Allan Poe on The Murders in the Rue Morgue

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
By Nathaniel Hawthorne on The Scarlet Letter

His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.
By Robert Louis Stevenson on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
By Mark Twain on The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills.
By Henry James on The Turn of the Screw

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most.
By Samuel Butler on The Way of All Flesh

"You see, dear heart," said he, "that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot."
By Arthur Conan Doyle on The White Company

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest -- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
By Robert Louis Stevenson on Treasure Island

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
By James Joyce on Ulysses

A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry whom she likes.
By William Makepeace Thackeray on Vanity Fair

Terror made me cruel...
By Emily Bronte on Wuthering Heights