Daily Inspiration Quote by Wilkie Collins

Truth, in Collins's hands, is less a polished monument than a living thing with elbows. "Struggle" makes it physical, almost indecorous: truth doesn’t glide into view on principle; it has to shove past obstruction, resistance, and the self-interest of whoever benefits from the dark. That verb also flatters the reader’s appetite for narrative. A struggle implies opponents, setbacks, and a turning point, which is exactly the machinery Collins perfected in sensation fiction: secrets embedded in respectable households, documents withheld, testimony doubted, clues misread. "To the light" is moral and theatrical at once. Light promises clarity, but it also means exposure, and exposure is rarely painless in Collins's world, where the revelation that sets the plot right also wrecks someone’s carefully curated innocence.

The line carries Victorian confidence in progress and providence, yet it’s not naive. Collins wrote at a moment when "truth" was increasingly bureaucratic and contested: police procedure, medical authority, courtrooms, newspapers. Facts didn’t simply exist; they were produced, authenticated, and often manipulated. By framing truth as something with "nature", he suggests inevitability without promising speed. It will emerge, but only after the gritty human work of watching, doubting, corroborating, and refusing convenient stories.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to complacency. If truth must struggle, then darkness isn’t accidental; it’s maintained. Collins is telling you where to look: at the hands on the lantern, and at the people leaning on the switch.