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Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.
CHARLES READE, White Lies
There is nothing but meeting and parting in this world.
CHARLES READE, Love Me Little, Love Me Long
What young woman is not, more or less, a mirror?
CHARLES READE, Christie Johnstone
Two lines are open to our honourable ambition, marriage, and--water-colours. I think marriage the more honourable of the two; above all, it is the more fashionable.
CHARLES READE, Love Me Little, Love Me Long
There is nothing like suffering to enlighten the giddy brain, widen the narrow mind, improve the trivial heart.
CHARLES READE, A Simpleton
Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows.
CHARLES READE, The Cloister and the Hearth
Sleep is life's nurse, sent from heaven to create us anew day by day.
CHARLES READE, attributed, Day's Collacon
We go and fancy that everybody is thinking of us. But he is not; he is like us—he is thinking of himself.
CHARLES READE, Griffith Gaunt: Or, Jealousy
I mean to take a good look at any man ere I leap into his arms.
CHARLES READE, The Cloister and the Hearth
A man with a woman's tongue--who can help fearing?
CHARLES READE, A Terrible Temptation
Such was Eve: when matters went smoothly, she itched to torment and take the gloss off David; but now the affair looked really desperate; so it would have been unkind not to sustain him with all her soul.
CHARLES READE, Love Me Little, Love Me Long
A sort of itch for settling other people's destinies, and so gaining a title to their curses for our pragmatical and fatal interference, is the commonest of all forms of sanctioned lunacy.
CHARLES READE, Love Me Little, Love Me Long
Good things have to be engraved on the memory; bad ones stick there of themselves.
CHARLES READE, White Lies
Prudence is not poverty; it is the thorny road to wealth.
CHARLES READE, attributed, Edge-Tools of Speech (Ballou, 1899)
The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up to wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds they were not worth so much trouble.
CHARLES READE, Christie Johnstone
Lose no time in sealing a good bargain.
CHARLES READE, Love Me Little, Love Me Long
Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
CHARLES READE, attributed, Notes and Queries (1903)
In players, vanity cripples art at every step.
CHARLES READE, Peg Woffington
She ... was puzzled to conceive how the bare idea of marriage came to be so tempting to her sex. Of course she could understand a lady wishing to marry, if she loved a gentleman who was determined to be unhappy without her: but that women should look about for some hunter to catch instead of waiting quietly till the hunter caught them, this puzzled her, and as for the superstitious love of females for marriage rites in cases when it took away their liberty and gave them nothing amiable in return, it amazed her.
CHARLES READE, Love Me Little, Love Me Long
We care the most for those that care the least for us.
CHARLES READE, Love Me Little, Love Me Long
A beautiful face fires our imagination, and we see higher virtue and intelligence in it than we can detect in its owner’s head or heart when we descend to calm inspection.
Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all--as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens.
CHARLES READE, A Simpleton
When two loving hearts are torn asunder, it is a shade better to be the one that is driven away into action than the bereaved twin that petrifies at home.
CHARLES READE, attributed, Notable Thoughts About Women: A Literary Mosaic (Ballou, 1882)
Even Christians loved one another at first starting.
CHARLES READE, The Cloister and the Hearth
First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction.
CHARLES READE, Peg Woffington
Lower a bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be immortal truth, mustn't it?
CHARLES READE, The Cloister and the Hearth
Good advice is like a tight glove; it fits the circumstances, and it does not fit other circumstances.
CHARLES READE, A Terrible Temptation
Every lie, great or small, is the brink of a precipice, the depth of which nothing but Omniscience can fathom.
CHARLES READE, It Is Never Too Late to Mend
Art is not imitation but illusion.
CHARLES READE, Christie Johnstone
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