We are indebted to Teresa Ransom, author of the 1999 biography The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli, Queen of Victorian Bestsellers for many of the quotations. Others are taken from an authorised collection of quotations entitled Thoughts from Marie Corelli edited by Elsie E Morton, published during Marie Corelli's lifetime. Additional selections by Nick Birch, the website administrator, and other contributors where shown.

She was an authoress of high repute, noted for her brilliant satirical pen, her contempt of press criticism, and her influence over, and utter indifference to all men.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

Beauty, though so perishable, is a snare to us all - it maddens our blood in spite of ourselves.
Vendetta 1886

They had known her when she was a little orphan girl with no brothers or sisters - no companions of her own age to amuse her - nothing, in fact, but her own pensive and romantic thoughts, which had, though she then knew it not, helped to weave her now brilliant destiny.

For, thank God, there exist thousands of very real ‘Christians’ – doing unostentatious good everywhere, rescuing the lost, aiding the poor, comforting the sick, and helping the world to grow happier and better. They may be called Jews, or Baptists, Papists or Buddhists, - but I hold them all as ‘Christians’ if they perform their good deeds and live those good lives which are acceptable to Christ, - while many church-going hypocrites called ‘Christians’ whose social existence is a scandal, whose dissipations, gross immoralities and pernicious example of living, are open dangers to the whole community, do not deserve even such a complimentary term as ‘pagan’ applied to them.
Free Opinions 1905

If you find on close self-examination, that you love yourself, your own importance, your position, your money, your household goods and clothes, your place in what you call ‘society’, more tan the steady working for and following of Christ, - YOU ARE NOT A CHRISTIAN.  That being the case, be brave about it! Say what you are, and do not pretend to be what you are not!

My great grief is that the spirit of Christ does not rule the world! Christ is being re-crucified by this generation! And the church is looking on, and silently permitting his second murder!!
The Master Christian 1900

Nothing can be more pitiful to see than the ruthless and stupid cutting down of noble trees all over the country, under the rule that their branches shall not hang over the road. . . . Our ancestors, more individually free, showed finer taste. They left us a heritage of many lovely and lasting things; but it is greatly to be feared that we shall not do likewise to those that come after us. We are destroying far more than we are creating.
Free Opinions - The Glory of Work. 1905

The art of conversation is almost a lost one. People talk as they ride bicycles - at a rush - without pausing to consider their surroundings.
The Vanishing Gift. 1905

Critics have no time to read any finished and careful work. They seldom can do more than scan the first page and the last. I know this, being a Critic myself, and I think it is a thousand pities authors should take any trouble to write a middle part to their stories.
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Nothing does you so much good as to be hurt. You then become aware that you are somebody who other bodies envy. You never know how high you have climbed till you feel a few dirty hands behind you trying to pull you down. 
God’s Good Man 1904

To be missed at all when you die, someone must love you very deeply and unselfishly; and unselfish love is rarer to find among mortals than a pearl in a dustbin.
The Sorrows of Satan 1995

One cannot always exist on the roses and honey of life, - that there must also be the useful cabbage boiled in water. True enough! – but death is preferable to perpetual cabbage and water. Indeed I have often thought that death is the least of evils, - save and only for the fact that it parts us from those we love, - but for the rest, - it gives us welcome relief from tiresome persons, ends our responsibilities, and  grants us a deep and abiding calm.
Open confession 1925

We know that if the Government could stop the sale of strong drink all over the country, - it would not,- because of depletion to the national revenues.
Holy Orders 1908

Learn, learn all you can my brothers – take the only good thing modern government gives you – Education. The education of the masses means the downfall of false creeds, - the ruin of false priests! For it is only through the ignorance of the many that tyrannical dominion is give into hands of the few! 
Temporal Power 1902Intellectual growth and advancement are seldom, if ever, associated with purely domestic comfort and tranquility.
Holy Orders 1908

What the fool cannot learn he laughs at, thinking that by his laughter he shows superiority instead of latent idiocy.
The Life Everlasting 1911

Mediocrity succeeds wonderfully well nowadays. Nobody hates it because everyone feels how easily they themselves can attain to it.
Ardath 1889

One must have enemies in this world, - that is, if one makes any sort of position, - people without enemies are generally nonentities.
The Sorrows of Satan 1895

Millionaires are generally such appalling creatures. Fortune, while giving them money, frequently deprives them of both brains and personal attractiveness.
The Sorrows of Satan 1895

It often happens that when bags of money fall to the lot of the aspiring genius, God departs and the devil walks in.
The Sorrows of Satan 1895

Fame is capricious, and her trumpet is not loud enough to be heard all over the world at once.
Ziska 1897.

Fortune frequently showers her choicest gifts on the most unworthy scoundrels, male and female, that burden this earth's surface. It's odd - it's unfair, but it's true.
Boy 1900

No one in the world ever tried to be good and great at the same time without suffering miscomprehension and bitterness.
The Master Christian 1900

Every one is more or less fevered with the mania of money-making - and when the money is made they have neither the education or the intelligence to spend it properly.
Holy Orders 1908

Fame is like a great white angel, who points you up to a cold, sparkling solitary mountain-top away from the world an bids you stay there alone, with the chill stars shining down on you. And people look at you and pass; you are too far off for the clasp of friendship; you are too isolated for the caress of love; and your enemies, unable to touch you, stare insolently, smile and cry aloud, "So you have climbed the summit at last! Well much good it do you! Stay there, live there, and die there, as you must, alone, forever!' And I think it is hard to be alone, don't you? 
The Murder of Delicia 1896

You can't live without having friends and enemies - you generally have more of the latter than the former, particularly if you are successful.
The Treasure of Heaven 1906

The financial side is the only view people generally take of any situation.
The Life Everlasting 1911

I have longed and do long for fame, for wealth, for the world's applause, for all the things that you seem to think so petty and mean. How can I help it? Is not fame power? Is not money double power, strong to assist one's self and those one loves? Is not the world's favour a necessary means to gain these things? 
The Secret Power 1921

We select friends that are useful to us personally - we care little for their intrinsic merit, and we only tolerate them as long as they happen to suit our taste.
Ardath 1889

Hate. 

Hatred is such a strong passion, - to hate well one must first have loved.
Vendetta 1886

Nothing gives small minds a better handle for hatred than superiority - especially when that superiority is never asserted, only felt.
The Life Everlasting 1911

In this world no one, however harmless, is allowed to continue happy. Fate - or caprice - cannot endure to see us monotonously at rest. Something perfectly trivial - a look, a word, a touch, and lo! a long chain of old associations is broken asunder, and the peace we deemed so deep and lasting is finally interrupted.
Vendetta 1886

No human being can stand too long on the topmost peak of joy. It is always necessary to come down, - sometimes to fall of precipitately.
Holy Orders 1908

Perfect happiness is the soul's acceptance of a sense of joy without question.
The Life Everlasting 1911

Unhappiness simply means life being put to the wrong uses.
The Life Everlasting 1911

In the renewal of life and the preservation of youth, thought is the chief factor. If we think we are old, we age rapidly. If, on the contrary, we think we are young, we preserve our vitality indefinitely.
The Life Everlasting 1911

I am generally judged as frivolous disposition because I am small in stature, slight in build, and have curly hair – all proofs positive, according to the majority, of latent foolishness.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

Most of the heroes and heroines of history have been small and slight in build.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

I am a lonely creature, disliked by many people and in the literary career I have adopted I fight a desperately hard battle, and often crave for a little, just a little sympathetic comprehension.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

The human world is always wicked tongued; and it is common knowledge that any man or woman introducing an ‘adopted’ child into a family is at once accused, whether he or she be conscious of the accusation or not, of passing off his own bastard under the ‘adoption’ pretext. What does it matter to the forces of creative life whether the child is brought into the world ‘basely’, as the phrase goes, or honourably? The child exists, - it is a human entity – a being full of potential good or evil. . . . It makes its own circumstances and shapes its own career, and in many cases the less it is interfered with the better.
Innocent 1914.

You are part of the days when, if a married woman entertained a score of lovers apart from her own husband, she was considered a disgrace to her sex. All that is altered my boy! She is now a 'Queen of Society'. It isn't love you see, it is something else. Love has gone out with the tinder-boxes and stage-coaches. It's all electricity and motor cars now - flash and fizzle through life at a tearing pace, and leave a bad smell behind you.
Boy 1900.

To the young, injustice seems strange - to the old it has become customary and natural.
Gods Good Man 1904.

Great originality and inspiration, strange to say, seldom endow the millionaire. Inspiration is supposed to come from above, - money from below!
The Sorrows of Satan 1895

Is not journalism free? Not so, my Lord: It is not the voice of 'the people' at all: it is simply the voice of a few editors.
The Silver Domino 1893

There is very little 'liberty of the press' in Great Britain nowadays. The press is the property of a few rich men.
Treasure of Heaven 1906

If low minded and illiterate scavengers are employed to write for the newspapers instead of well-educated men, we must put up with the mud the scavengers collect.
The Secret Power 1921

Nothing upon earth is so singular as kindness, - nothing so rare as sympathy, - nothing so absolutely unique, wonderful and purely divine, as ungrudging, unboastful, devoted, changeless love that seeks nothing for itself, but freely gives everything.
Barrabas 1893

Just how to make ourselves pleasant and kind to every one for the passing hour, is as much duty as anything else in this world.
Boy 1900

Life is a talisman, dropped freely into they bosom, but the fitting use of the magic gift must be discovered by thyself alone.
Barrabas 1893.

Life is like being out on the sea yonder, - a body must take the rough with the smooth and make the best of it.
The Mighty Atom 1896

As the terror of imagined sufferings are always worse than actual pain, so dreams are frequently more vivid than the reality of life, - that is, if we are sure that life is indeed reality, and not a itself a dream within a dream.
The Master Christian 1900

To lose one's illusions is to lose the world.
Gods Good Man 1904

Life itself is a continual battle between good and evil, and if it were not so we should have no object in living. The whole business is evidently intended to be a close conflict to the end.
The Life Everlasting 1911

The one thing that humanity never studies, and therefore fails to master, is Life! 
The Life Everlasting 1911

Loneliness is horrible! It is the chief terror of death, - for one must always die alone. No matter matter how many friends and relatives stand weeping round.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

Love, no matter how abused and maltreated, is a very patient god, and even while suffering from undeserved wounds, still works on, doing magical things.
Thelma 1887

Love is electricity. Two telegrams are enough to settle the business, - one from the eyes of the man, the other from the eyes of the woman.
Thelma 1887

Is love alone worth living for - worth dying for? Is it the only satisfying good we can grasp at among the shifting shadows of our brief existence? In all it's various phases and different workings, is it, after all, the brightest radiance known in the struggling darkness of our lives?
Thelma 1887

A moneyless man if he wins a woman's love knows that such love is genuine and untainted by self-interest; but a rich man can never be truly certain of love at all.
The Sorrows of Satan 1895

A love affair, to be conducted with spirit and enterprise, should always bristle with opposition and difficulty, real or invented.
The Sorrows of Satan 1895

Love, - that most god-like of all emotions, has many phases, and a merely sexual attraction is the least and worst part of the divine passion.
The Treasure of Heaven 1906.

There's no love without self respect - no real love. There are certain kinds of stupid fancies called love - but they've no 'wear' them! They wouldn't last a month, let alone a whole lifetime.
The Treasure of Heaven 1906

What is heaven? A state of perfect happiness. What is happiness? The immortal union of two souls in one, creatures of God's eternal light, partaking of each other's thoughts, bestowing upon each other the renewal of joy, and creating loveliness in form and action by their mutual sympathy and tenderness.
The Life Everlasting 1911

Love must be tender yet resolved! - Love must not swerve from it's given pledge! - Love must be all or nothing!.
The Life Everlasting 1911

I am not unpleased with the bitter-sweet taste of this new sensation. I am conscious of joy when you are near me, and of desolation when I see you not at all - both joy and desolation are equally subtle in sweetness.

Open Confessions 1925

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.
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Marriage is not a sacrament nowadays, - it is merely a form for the legalising of children in order that they may inherit what their fathers leave them.
The Treasure of Heaven 1906

As a rule men detest clever women, simply because they are jealous of them.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

It is a mistake all men make with all women, - to judge them always as being of the same base material as themselves.
Ziska 1897.

There is not a man born that does not hate too pure a woman: it is his joy to degrade her if he can! That is the way of Nature; what is woman made for except to subject herself to her master! And when she rises superior to him - superior in soul, intellect, heart and mind, he sees nothing in her but an abnormal prodigy to be stared at, laughed at, despised - but never loved!

The Master Christian 1900

A woman who really loves a man governs him, unconsciously to herself, by the twin powers of sex and instinct. She was intended for his helpmate, to guide him in the right way by her finer forces.
The Treasure of Heaven 1906

It is generally through a woman that a man makes his mark, though he will never own it!
Holy Order 1908.

There is no more absolute truth than this - that each man and each woman must make his or her own destiny both here and hereafter.
The Life Everlasting 1911.

Absolutely disinterested love for a brilliantly endowed woman would be difficult to find in any male nature. Men love what is inferior to themselves, not superior. Thus women who are endowed with more then common intellectual ability have to choose from one of two alternatives. Love, or what is called love, and child bearing, - or fame, and lifelong loneliness.
Secret Power 1921

A man, if he be strong and healthy, is always more or less ashamed when Love, with a single effort, proves him to be weaker than a blade of grass swaying in the wind. What! all his dignity, all his resoluteness, all his authority, swept down by the light touch of a willow wand?
Thelma 1887

If a man rushes wilfully into danger, danger will not move itself out of the way for him.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

No man was ever persistently heroic, in small matters as well as great, and famous deeds are ever done on impulse.
Barrabas 1893

A dog may be honest without offence to the world in general, but a man must never be honest, unless he wishes to be considered a fool or a madman, or both.
The Murder of Delicia 1896

Man is not by any means supreme. He imagines he is, but that is only one of his many delusions.
Ziska 1897 

Men are all like children - they tire of their toys.
Ziska 1897

As a rule men do not understand love. They understand desire, amounting sometimes to merciless covetousness for what they cannot get, - this is a leading characteristic of the masculine nature.
Ziska 1897.

Men as a rule don't like to let anyone anything or anybody have their own way except themselves!.
Gods Good Man 1904

Most men who have lived and worked and suffered, come to know before they die that without a great and true love in their lives, their work is wasted, and their sufferings are in vain.
The Treasure of Heaven 1906

The careful student of history cannot fail to notice that whenever the rottenness and inadequacy of a Government are most apparent, great 'shows' and Royal ceremonials are always resorted to, in order to divert the minds of the people from the better consideration of a deficient Exchequer and a diminishing National Honour.
Temporal Power 1902

Self-slaughter may be called cowardly, but surely self-deception is its equal in cowardice?
Holy Orders 1908

It is not of ourselves we should think, for ourselves are always too much with us; - it is others upon whom our conduct and example may have a lasting good or evil influence.
Holy Orders 1908

Reasonable care of one's self is unselfishness, but anything in excess of reasonable is pure vice.
The Life Everlasting 1911

The Murder of Delicia 1896

An outburst of actual sincerity in society would be like a match to a gunpowder magazine - the whole thing would blow up into fragments and be dispersed to the four winds of heaven, leaving nothing but an evil odour.
The Soul of Lilith 1892

Real honest laughter is not considered 'good form' by certain sections of society. A gentle imitation of a nanny goat's bleat is the most seemly way for cultured persons to give vent to the expressions of mirth.
Gods Good Man 1904

Nothing does you so much good as to be hurt. You then become aware that you are somebody who other bodies envy. You never know how high you have climbed till you feel a few dirty hands behind you trying to pull you down.
Gods Good Man 1904

Of course, like all good Americans, I've been to Stratford-upon-Avon. I was hit in the eye by the spectacle of a bizarre theatre on the banks of the classic Avon, as inartistic a pile of bricks as I ever beheld, and I was told it had been built by a brewer as a 'memorial' to Shakespeare. Then I grasped the architectural design, of course, - which is that of a glorified brewery, round vat and all complete.
Holy Orders 1908

What hundreds of years it took us to discover steam! One can say the same for electricity, sometimes called miraculous - it is no miracle but perfectly common and natural, only we have, until now, failed to apply it to our needs - and even when wider disclosures of science are being made to us every day we still bar knowledge by obstinacy, and remain in ignorance rather than learn… A few grains in weight of hydrogen have power enough to raise a million tons to a height of more than three hundred feet….And as for motive power, in a thimbleful of concentrated fuel we might take the largest ship across the widest ocean. 
The Life Everlasting 1911

People always take refuge in thinking that those who tell them uncomfortable truths are lunatics
Ziska 1897.

There is nothing so inconvenient in this world as an absolutely truthful person, who can both speak and write, and has the courage of his convictions.
The Master Christian 1900

Lying is never a profitable business in youth - but in age it is pure waste of time and energy. With one foot in the grave it is as well to keep the other from slipping. 
The Treasure of Heaven 1906

War - especially nowadays is a mere slaughterhouse - and soldiers are the poor sheep led to the shambles. The real nature of the thing is covered up under the flying flags and the shout of patriotism, but, as a matter of stern fact, it is a horrible piece of cowardice for one nation to try murdering another just to see which one gets it's way first.
Boy 1900

There is only one thing that can ease the burden of life for a woman, and that is love.
Gods Good Man 1904

Humility is the strongest weapon in all woman's armoury.
Gods Good Man 1904

You can always pick out a very dull respectable woman by the hideousness of her clothes.
Gods Good Man 1904

There has never been anything born under the sun crueller than a twentieth-century woman of fashion to her own sex - except perhaps a starving hyaena tearing asunder it's living prey.
The Treasure of Heaven 1906

A pretty woman is always an object of suspicion to the plain majority - and when she adds elegant attire to the attractions of form and feature, she is still more quickly and utterly condemned.
Holy Orders 1908

It remains, even in these days, the greatest power for good or evil in the world. With the little instrument which rests so lightly in the hand, whole nations can be moved. It is nothing to look at; generally speaking it is a mere bit of wood with a nib at the end of it - but when it is poised between thumb and finger, it becomes a living thing - it moves with the pulsations of a loving heart and thinking brain, and writes down, almost unconsciously, the thoughts that live - the words that burn. 
Free Opinions 1905

Power! The power to make men and women think, hope and achieve; the power to draw tears from the eyes, smiles from the lips of thousands; the power to make tyrants tremble, and unseat false judges in authority; the power to strip hypocrisy of its seeming fair disguise, and to brand liars with their name writ large for all the world to see!

The Murder of Delicia 1896

Work brings content - if it does not ensure joy.
The Master Christian 1900

I am simple worker, - earning every penny I need, - a worker and weaver of dreams. One of the dreams was love - and though rudely awakened, I still have power to dream again.

Open Confessions 1925