Quotes by Novels

We of the sea come to know each other quickly; our loves, like our hates, are born of sudden dangers.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
In every four there is one the slowest, and one the swiftest; and while the race is always to the slowest, the trouble is always with the swiftest.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
For know you, child, I have that faculty which is better than any one sense, better than a perfect body, better than courage and will, better than experience, ordinarily the best product of the longest lives—the faculty divinest of men, but which”—he stopped, and laughed again, not bitterly, but with real zest—“but which even the great do not sufficiently account, while with the herd it is a non-existent—the faculty of drawing men to my purpose and holding them faithfully to its achievement, by which, as against things to be done, I multiply myself into hundreds and thousands.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Everyone has known this condition of mind, though perhaps not all in the same degree; everyone will recognise it as the condition in which he has done brave things with apparent serenity; and everyone reading will say, Fortunate for Ben Hur if the folly which now catches him is but a friendly harlequin with whistle and pointed cap, and not some Violence with a pointed sword pitiless.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
It was then I saw thy mother, and loved her, and took her away in my secret heart.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
You are never fully dressed until you put on a smile!
Les Miserables
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Pride is never so loud as when in chains.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
I see, I see! From association Messala, in boyhood, was almost a Jew; had he remained here, he might have become a proselyte, so much do we all borrow from the influences that ripen our lives; but the years in Rome have been too much for him. I do not wonder at the change; yet”--her voice fell--“he might have dealt tenderly at least with you. It is a hard, cruel nature which in youth can forget its first loves.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
The enemy of man is man, my brother.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Take an eye for an eye, turn your heart into stone, this all I have lived for, this all I have known.
Les Miserables
He was angry; not as the irritable, from chafing of a trifle; nor was his anger like the fool's, pumped from the wells of nothing, to be dissipated by a reproach or a curse; it was the wrath peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened by the sudden annihilation of a hope --dream, if you will-- in which the choicest happinesses were thought to be certainly in reach. In such case nothing intermediate will carry off the passion --the quarrel is with Fate.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
They are like men: if bold, the better of scolding; if timid, the better of praise and flattery.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I, and what am I to be? have need of ever so much care. Each word in answer may prove to the after-life what each finger-touch of the artist is to the clay he is modelling.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Death, you know, keeps secrets better even than a guilty Roman.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
For power, you know, is a fretful thing, and hath its wings always spread for flight.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ