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.

She knew how to allure by denying, and to make the gift rich by delaying it.

She understood how much louder a cock can crow in his own farmyard than elsewhere . . .

She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never condescended to construct a decoration.

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

There was but one thing for him;- to persevere till he got her, or till he had finally lost her. And should the latter be his fate, as he began to fear that it would be, then, he would live, but live only, like a crippled man.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.

Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.

Of course, Lady Arabella could not suckle the young heir herself. Ladies Arabella never can. They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse.

Let no man boast himself that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May.

Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so.

After money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing.

My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.

I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor. The chances are perhaps more in favour of ruin than of success. But, whatever may be the chances, I shall go on as long as any means of carrying on the fight are at my disposal.

A pleasant letter I hold to be the pleasantest thing that this world has to give.

But the hobbledehoy, though he blushes when women address him, and is uneasy even when he is near them, though he is not master ofhis limbs in a ball-room, and is hardly master of his tongue at any time, is the most eloquent of beings, and especially eloquent among beautiful women.

Never let the estate decrease in your hands. It is only by such resolutions as that that English noblemen and English gentlemen can preserve their country. I cannot bear to see property changing hands.

Would it not be better to go home and live at the family park all the year round, and hunt, and attend Quarter Sessions, and be able to declare morning and evening with a clear conscience that the country was going to the dogs? Such was the mental working of many a Conservative who supported Mr. Daubeny on this occasion.

The best way to be thankful is to use the goods the gods provide you.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who holds a low opinion of himself.

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

A farmer's horse is never lame, never unfit to go. Never throws out curbs, never breaks down before or behind. Like his master he is never showy. He does not paw and prance, and arch his neck, and bid the world admire his beauties...and when he is wanted, he can always do his work.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

It's dogged as does it. It ain't thinking about it.

Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.

I cannot hold with those who want to put down the insignificant chatter of the world

It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing

Success is a poison that should only be taken late in life and then only in small doses.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife?

When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end.

A physician should take his fee without letting his left hand know what his right is doing; it should be taken without a thought, without a look, without a move of the facial muscles; the true physician should hardly be aware that the last friendly grasp of the hand has been made more precious by the touch of gold

It is hard to conceive that the old, whose thoughts have been all thought out, should ever love to live alone. Solitude is surely for the young, who have time before them for the execution of schemes, and who can, therefore, take delight in thinking

I have read - nay, I have bought! - Carlyle's 'Latter Day Pamphlets,' and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown away. To me it appears that the grain of sense is so smothered up in a sack of the sheerest trash, that the former is valueless....I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature and who has now done so.

The greatest mistake any man ever made is to suppose that the good things of the world are not worth the winning.

I doubt whether I ever read any description of scenery which gave me an idea of the place described.