Anthony Trollope Quotations

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable.

A man's mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

Never think that you're not good enough. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.

Marvelous is the power which can be exercised, almost unconsciously, over a company, or an individual, or even upon a crowd by one person gifted with good temper, good digestion, good intellects, and good looks.

A woman's life is not perfect or whole till she has added herself to a husband. Nor is a man's life perfect or whole till he has added to himself a wife.

Oxford is the most dangerous place to which a young man can be sent.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.

I do like a little romance... just a sniff, as I call it, of the rocks and valleys. Of course, bread-and-cheese is the real thing. The rocks and valleys are no good at all, if you haven't got that.

Wine is valued by its price, not its flavour.

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

I think the greatest rogues are they who talk most of their honesty.

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

There are some achievements which are never done in the presence of those who hear of them. Catching salmon is one, and working all night is another.

High rank and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart.

There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.

But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.

This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can't fly away.

I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.

It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.

Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music about affairs masculine and feminine, then take the leap in the dark.

It is self-evident that at sixty-five a man has done all that he is fit to do.

Cham is the only thing to screw one up when one is down a peg.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

They are best dressed, whose dress no one observes.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

I do not know whether there be, as a rule, more vocal expression of the sentiment of love between a man and a woman, than there is between two thrushes. They whistle and call to each other, guided by instinct rather than by reason.

It is necessary to get a lot of men together, for the show of the thing, otherwise the world will not believe. That is the meaning of committees. But the real work must always be done by one or two men.

It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.

A man's love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit.

As to happiness in this life it is hardly compatible with that diminished respect which ever attends the relinquishing of labour.

A fellow oughtn't to let his family property go to pieces.

A husband is very much like a house or a horse.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.

It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.

Since woman's rights have come up a young woman is better able to fight her own battle.

What is there that money will not do?

When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him, have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind.

The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.

The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.

There are words which a man cannot resist from a woman, even though he knows them to be false.

Perhaps there is no position more perilous to a man's honesty thanthat?of knowing himselftobe quiteloved by a girl whom he almost loves himself.

Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.

The girl can look forward to little else than the chance of having a good man for her husband; a good man, or if her tastes lie in that direction, a rich man.

The circumstances seemed to be simple; but they who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature.

No one can depute authority. It comes too much from personal accidents, and too little from reason or law to be handed over to others.

If we wish ourselves to be high, we should treat that which is over us as high.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.

I know no place at which an Englishman may drop down suddenly among a pleasanter circle of acquaintance, or find himself with a more clever set of men, than he can do at Boston.

If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over. Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

Is it not singular how some men continue to obtain the reputation of popular authorship without adding a word to the literature of their country worthy of note?? To puff and to get one's self puffed have become different branches of a new profession.

In former days, when there were Whigs instead of Liberals, it was almost a rule of political life that all leading Whigs sould be uncles, brothers-in-law, or cousins to each other. This was pleasant and gave great consistency to the party; but the system has now gone out of vogue.

Audacity in wooing is a great virtue, but a man must measure even his virtues.

The grace and beauty of life will be clean gone when we all become useful men.

But facts always convince, and another man's opinion rarely convinces.

One doesn't have an agreement to that effect written down on parchment and sealed; but it is as well understood and ought to be as faithfully kept as any legal contract.

For themost of us, if we donot talkof ourselves, orat any rate of the individual circles of which we are the centres, we can talk of nothing. I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

If a cook can't make soup between two and seven, she can't make it in a week.

Though they were Liberals they were not democrats; nor yet infidels.

It may, indeed, be assumed that a man who loses his temper while he is speaking is endeavouring to speak the truth such as he believes it to be, and again it may be assumed that a man who speaks constantly without losing his temper is not always entitled to the same implicit faith.

Let a man be of what side he may in politics, unless he be much more of a partisan than a patriot, he will think it well that there should be some equity of division in the bestowal of crumbs of comfort.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate--but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.

Men who cannot believe in the mystery of our Saviour's redemption can believe that spirits from the dead have visited them in a stranger's parlour, because they see a table shake and do not know how it is shaken; because they hear a rapping on a board, and cannot see the instrument that raps it; because they are touched in the dark, and do not know the hand that touches them.

There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds.

Nothing reopens the springs of love so fully as absence, and no absence so thoroughly as that which must needs be endless.

Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession.

That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or aset of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen--makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest state of degradation.

Here in England the welfare of the State depends on the conduct of our aristocracy.

There's nothing like going on with a thing.

It is easy to love one's enemy when one is making fine speeches; but so difficult to do so in the actual everyday work of life.

Does not all the world know that when in autumn the Bismarcks of the world, or they who are bigger than Bismarcks, meet at this or that delicious haunt of salubrity, the affairs of the world are then settled in little conclaves, with grater ease, rapidity, and certainty than in large parliaments or the dull chambers of public offices?