58 Classic Timeless Quotes

In a world where moments are fleeting and trends come and go, certain words have a magical way of standing the test of time. These words remind us of the wisdom, wit, and enduring human spirit that traverse the passages of history. If you're seeking inspiration, motivation, or simply a moment of reflection, there's no better source than the timeless wisdom encapsulated in classic quotes. We've curated a collection of the top 58 Classic Timeless Quotes for you to explore. Whether you’re a lover of philosophy, literature, or simply cherish profound thoughts that provoke and inspire, these quotes are sure to resonate and enrich your day.

1. “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” - Jane Austen

2. “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” - William Shakespeare

3. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

4. “Oh, I am fortune's fool!” - William Shakespeare

5. “Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.” - Charles Dickens

6. “My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.” - Charles Dickens

7. “I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time.” - Charles Dickens

8. “Oh! that look of love!" continued he, between his teeth, as he bolted himself into his own private room. "And that cursed lie; which showed some terrible shame in the background, to be kept from the light in which I thought she lived perpetually! Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Mother, how you have tortured me! Oh! Margaret, could you not have loved me? I am but uncouth and hard, but I would never have led you into any falsehood for me.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

9. “He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him.~ Stephen speaking of Rachael” - Charles Dickens

10. “My dear fellow " Said Albert, turning to Franz " here is an admirable adventure; we will fill our carriage with pistols, blunderbusses, and double-barreled shotguns. Luigi Vampa comes to take us, and we take him - we bring him back to Rome , and present him to him holiness the Pope, who asks how he can repay so great a service; Then we merely ask for a cariage and a pair of horses, and we will see the Carnival in the carriage , and doubtless the Roman people will crown us at the capitol , and proclaim us, like Curtius and the veiled Horatius, the preservers of there country." Whilst Albert proposed this scheme, signor Pastrini's face assumed an expression impossible to describe.” - Alexandre Dumas

11. “The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.” - Cervantes Saavedra

12. “the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982” - Leo Tolstoy

13. “After all, tomorrow is another day!” - Margaret Mitchell

14. “If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.” - Emily Brontë

15. “I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.” - Marlon Brando

16. “he's not a piece of meat you can job off the market by the pound. because, if you do,maish, if you do, you'll rot in hell.” - Rod Serling

17. “A vibrator can last all night, too, vampire! - Denise” - Jeaniene Frost

18. “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit (everything changes, nothing perishes).” - Publius Ovidius Naso

19. “The blood is the life!” - Bram Stoker

20. “I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.” - Bram Stoker

21. “God save King Pendragon,May his reign long drag on,God save the King.Send him most gorious,Great and uproarious,Horrible and hoarious,God save our King.” - T.H. White

22. “Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep,even so I will endure…For already have I suffered full much,and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.Let this be added to the tale of those.” - Homer

23. “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” - Mario Puzo

24. “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

25. “There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.” - Joseph Conrad

26. “There was a dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips.” - Kate Chopin

27. “Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"..."It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...” - Frances Hodgson Burnett

28. “You must come to Lockleigh again," said Miss Molyneux, very sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel's friend. Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton—the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux and then she said: "I'm afraid I can never come again.” - Henry James

29. “Ich wage kaum die Hände auszustrecken, wie in einem engen Spiegelzimmer, aus Furcht überall anzustoßen, daß die schönen Figuren in Scherben auf dem Boden lägen und ich vor der kahlen, nackten Wand stünde.” - Georg Buchner

30. “As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.” - Margret Mitchell

31. “I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.” - William Shakespeare

32. “I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.” - Jospeh Conrad

33. “All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.” - Tolstoy

34. “Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.” - Von Goethe Johann Wolfgang

35. “The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.” - George Santayana

36. “„Was glänzt ist für den Augenblick geboren; Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

37. “And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.” - Mario Puzo

38. “The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.” - G.K. Chesterton

39. “It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

40. “Roz to Amelia (the house ghost): How considerate of you, after trying to kill me, to see that I don't catch a cold.” - Nora Roberts

41. “Söylemek istediğim şu ki, medeniyet ihracı fikrine alışamıyorum ben. Çok değil, daha on sekizinci yüzyılla rayına giren endüstriyel dönemin başlangıcına kadar, şehirlerinin sokaklarından açık lağımlar akan ve tuvalet alışkanlığı bulunmayan bu insanlardan şimdi medeniyet dilemek zorunda kalmak bana zür geliyor.” - Okay Tiryakioğlu

42. “Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters.- Gormenghast” - Mervyn Peake

43. “He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.” - Leo Tolstoy

44. “You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me if you will: you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat.Try fighting with your head for a change . . .it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.” - Harper Lee

45. “I get the same buzz cleaning up the yard as Leo Tolstoy did from scything hay.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

46. “He looked just perfect to play Dorian Gray in a film version of Oscar Wilde's novel. Young, graceful, and indecently fresh and handsome, he could easily have worn a badge that said READY FOR DEBAUCHERY!” - Sergei Lukyanenko

47. “But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.” - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

48. “Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.” - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

49. “The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.” - John Steinbeck

50. “There was a leap of joy in him, like a flame lighting up in a dark lantern. At this moment he believed it was worth it. This moment of supreme beauty was worth all the wretchedness of the journey. It was always worth it. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." It was the central truth of existence, and all men knew it, though they might not know that they knew it. Each man followed his own star through so much pain because he knew it, and at journey's end all the innumerable lights would glow into one.” - Elizabeth Goudge

51. “You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.” - C.S. Lewis

52. “Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.” - J.M. Barrie

53. “This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.” - John Buchan

54. “The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.” - G.K. Chesterton

55. “This is what happened.” - Douglas Fairbairn

56. “Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.” - Roger Scruton

57. “Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.” - Bram Stoker

58. “Being stubborn won't make you fluent. Practicing will! The more mistakes you make, the more you'll learn not to.” - Thanhha Lai