Marie Corelli > Quotes

“I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.”
― Marie Corelli

“Let me be mad, then, by all means! mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l'amour! Vive l'animalisme! Vive le Diable!”
― Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris

“No one is contented in this world, I believe. There is always something left to desire, and the last thing longed for always seems the most necessary to happiness.”
― Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds

“So you are tired of your life, young man! All the more reason have you to live. Anyone can die. A murderer has moral force enough to jeer at his hangman. It is very easy to draw the last breath. It can be accomplished successfully by a child or a warrior. One pang of far less anguish than the toothache, and all is over. There is nothing heroic about it, I assure you! It is as common as going to bed; it is almost prosy. Life is heroism, if you like; but death is a mere cessation of business. And to make a rapid and rude exit off the stage before the prompter gives the sign is always, to say the least of it, ungraceful. Act the part out, no matter how bad the play. What say you?”
― Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds

“takes its colours from the mind, my dear friend;”—he said—“If you discover evil suggestions in my music, the evil, I fear, must be in your own nature.”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan

“But a man gifted with original thoughts and the power of expressing them, appears to be regarded by everyone in authority as much worse than the worst criminal, and all the ‘jacks-in-office’ unite to kick him to death if they can.”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan

“The finest actor is he who play the comedy of life perfectly, as i aspire to do. To walk well, talk well, weep well, laugh well and die well, it is all pure acting, because in every man there is the dumb dreadful immortal spirit who is real- who cannot act, who-is and who steadily maintains an infinite though speechless protest against the body's lies”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire

“Curious that it is impossible for a man to be original without attracting around him a set of unoriginal minds, as though he were a honey-pot and they the flies!”
― Marie Corelli

“Few authors feel sufficiently themselves to make others ''feel”
― Marie Corelli

“I can dip the pen in my own blood if I choose.”
― Marie Corelli, Vendetta; or, the Story of One Forgotten

“any era that is dominated by the love of money only, has a rotten core within it and must perish”
― Marie Corelli

“Be sure that if you are unhappily celebrated for either beauty, wit, intellect, or all three together, half society wishes you dead already, and the other half tries to make you as wretched as possible while you are alive.”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire

“no fame is actually worth much now-a-days,—because it is not classic fame, strong in reposeful old-world dignity,—it is blatant noisy notoriety merely.”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan

“There, the sublime, unreachable mysteries of the Universe are haggled over by poor finite minds who cannot call their lives their own. There, nation wars against nation, creed against creed, soul against soul. Alas, fated planet! how soon shalt thou be extinct, and thy place shall know thee no more!”
― Marie Corelli, Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated)

“I trusted in friendship rather than love”
― Marie Corelli, Vendetta; or, the Story of One Forgotten

“Whoever seeks to live by brain and pen alone is, at the beginning of such a career, treated as a sort of social pariah.”
― Marie Corelli

“Well I am glad I have something of the fool in my disposition--foolishness being the only quality that makes wisdom possible.”
― Marie Corelli

“Listen to the silence of the earth while the lark sings! Have you ever observed the receptive attitude in which Nature seems to wait for sounds divine!”
― Marie Corelli

“I am going to make you what you may perhaps consider rather a singular proposition. It is this, that if you don’t like me, say so at once, and we will part now, before we have time to know anything more of each other, and I will endeavour not to cross your path again unless you seek me out. But if on the contrary, you do like me,—if you find something in my humour or turn of mind congenial to your own disposition, give me your promise that you will be my friend and comrade for a while, say for a few months at any rate. I can take you into the best society, and introduce you to the prettiest women in Europe as well as the most brilliant men. I know them all, and I believe I can be useful to you. But if there is the smallest aversion to me lurking in the depths of your nature”—here he paused,—then resumed with extraordinary solemnity—“in God’s name give it full way and let me go,—because I swear to you in all sober earnest that I am not what I seem!”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire

“Does one love a statue?" she demanded. "Shall I caress a picture? Shall I rain tears or kisses over the mere semblance of a life that does not live, shall I fondle hands that never return my clasp? Love! Love is in my heart -yes! like a shut-up fire in a tomb,but you hold the key, and the flame dies for want of air.”
― Marie Corelli, The Soul of Lilith

“My aim throughout is to let facts speak for themselves. If they seem strange, unreal, even impossible, I can only say that the things of the invisible world must always appear so to those whose thoughts and desires are centred on this life only.”
― Marie Corelli, Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated)

“Wealth acts merely as a kind of mirror to show you human nature at its worst.”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan

“Beauty combined with wantonness frequently ends in the drawn twitch, fixed eye and helpless limbs of life-in-death. It is Nature’s revenge on the outraged body,—and do you know, Eternity’s revenge on the impure Soul is extremely similar?”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire

“There was something else,--something quite undefinable, that gave a singular glow and radiance to the whole countenance, and suggested the burning of a light through alabaster,--a creeping of some subtle fire through the veins which made the fair body seem the mere reflection of some greater fairness within.”
― Marie Corelli, The Soul of Lilith

“A man should choose a wife with a careful eye to his own personal gratification, in the same way that he chooses horses or wine--perfection or nothing.
And the woman?
The woman has really no right of choice, she must mate wherever she has the chance of being properly maintained. A man is always a man--a woman is only a man's appendage, and without beauty she cannot put forth any just claim to his admiration or support.”
― Marie Corelli

“Man, as a purely natural creature, fairly educated, but wholly unspiritualized, is a mental composition of: Hunger, Curiosity, Self-Esteem, Avarice, Cowardice, Lust, Cruelty, Personal Ambition; and on these vile qualities alone our ‘society’ hangs together; the virtues have no place anywhere, and do not count at all, save as conveniently pious metaphors.”
― Marie Corelli, The Soul of Lilith

“Was it worth while, he thought, to be so wise, if wisdom made one at times so sad? Was it well to sacrifice Faith for Fact, when Faith was so warm and Fact so cold? Was it better to be a dreamer of things possible, or a worker-out of things positive? And how much was positive, after all, and how much possible? He balanced the question lightly with himself. It was like a discord in the music of his mind, and disturbed his peace.”
― Marie Corelli, The Soul of Lilith

“all the best, greatest, purest and worthiest things in life are beyond all market-value and that the gifts of the gods are not for sale.”
― Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan

“Nothing is more strange than truth — nothing, at times, more terrible!”
― Marie Corelli, Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated)

“Like it!” I exclaimed. “It is lovely — wonderful! It is worthy to rank with the finest Italian masterpieces.” “Oh, no!” remonstrated Zara; “no, indeed! When the great Italian sculptors lived and worked — ah! one may say with the Scriptures, ‘There were giants in those days.’ Giants — veritable ones; and we modernists are the pigmies. We can only see Art now through the eyes of others who came before us. We cannot create anything new. We look at painting through Raphael; sculpture through Angelo; poetry through Shakespeare; philosophy through Plato. It is all done for us; we are copyists. The world is getting old — how glorious to have lived when it was young! But nowadays the very children are blase.”
― Marie Corelli, Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated)