Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Since woman’s rights have come up a young woman is better able to fight her own battle.”

— Anthony Trollope

52. “It is easy for most of us to keep our hands from picking and stealing when picking and stealing plainly lead to prison diet and prison garments. But when silks and satins come of it, and with the silks and satins general respect, the net result of honesty does not seem to be so secure.”

— Anthony Trollope

53. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

54. “Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else, will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.”

— Anthony Trollope

55. “They say that faint heart never won fair lady. It is amazing to me how fair ladies are won, so faint are often men’s hearts!”

— Anthony Trollope

56. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

57. “Life is so unlike theory.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

59. “Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, ‘Women grow on the sunny side of the wall.”

— Anthony Trollope

60. “The bishop did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrated; and that in these days one might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop; but he looked as though he would have done so, but for his apron.”

— Anthony Trollope

61. “The author now leaves him in the hands of his readers: not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man, without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn.”

— Anthony Trollope

62. “Why is it that when men and women congregate, though the men may beat the women in numbers by ten to one, and through they certainly speak the louder, the concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women’s voices?”

— Anthony Trollope

63. “No living orator would convince a grocer that coffee should be sold without chicory; and no amount of eloquence will make an English lawyer think that loyalty to truth should come before loyalty to his client.”

— Anthony Trollope

64. “We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.”

— Anthony Trollope

65. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

66. “He was essentially a truth-speaking man, if only he know how to speak the truth.”

— Anthony Trollope

67. “Short accounts make long friends.”

— Anthony Trollope

68. “There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons.”

— Anthony Trollope

69. “When he entered the drawing-room she was sitting alone, in a large, low chair, made without arms, so as to admit the full expansion of her dress, but hollowed and rounded at the back, so as to afford her the support that was necessary to her. She had barely spoke three words since she had left the dining-room, but the time had not passed heavily with her.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

71. “He had for two years been a suitor of Violet Effingham, who was the acknowledged beauty of the day, – of Violet Effingham who, at the present time, was the wife of Lord Chiltern; and he had offered himself thrice to Madame Max Goesler, who was reputed to be as rich as she was beautiful.”

— Anthony Trollope

72. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

73. “Remember me very kindly to the duke, and pray enable poor Fawn to keep up his spirits. If he likes to arrange a meeting with Lord George, I shall be only too happy to be his friend. You remember our last duel. Chiltern is with you, and can put Fawn up to the proper way of getting over to Flanders, – and of returning, should he chance to escape.”

— Anthony Trollope

74. “Lodgings in London are always gloomy. Gloomy colours wear better than bright ones for curtains and carpets, and the keepers of lodgings in London seem to think that a certain dinginess of appearance is respectable. I never saw a London lodging in which any attempt at cheerfulness had been made, and I do not think that any such attempt, if made, would pay.”

— Anthony Trollope

75. “Lord Chiltern recognizes the great happiness of having a grievance. It would be a pity that so great a blessing should be thrown away upon him.”

— Anthony Trollope

76. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

77. “If she were born a gentlewoman! And then came to her mind those curious questions; what makes a gentleman? what makes a gentlewoman? What is the inner reality, the spiritualised quintessence of that privilege in the world which men call rank, which forces the thousands and hundreds of thousands to bow down before the few elect? What gives, or can give it, or should give it?”

— Anthony Trollope

78. “A husband is very much like a house or a horse.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

80. “Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.”

— Anthony Trollope

81. “When he knows,” continued Mary, who would not be put down, “that I love another man with all my heart. What will Lord Popplecourt say if I tell him that? If he says anything to me, I shall tell him. Lord Popplecourt! He cares for nothing but his coal-mines. Of course, if you bid me see him I will; but it can do no good. I despise him, and if he troubles me I shall hate him. As for marrying him, – I would sooner die this minute.”

— Anthony Trollope

82. “The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.”

— Anthony Trollope

83. “No other American city is so intensely American as New York.”

— Anthony Trollope

84. “When such men as Laurence Fitzgibbon were called upon to act as governors, was it not to be expected that the ignorant but still intelligent Bunces of the population should – “d––––n it all”?”

— Anthony Trollope

85. “He was one of those men who, as in youth they are never very young, so in age are they never very old.”

— Anthony Trollope

86. “It is easier,’” said Mr. Outhouse solemnly, “’for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

— Anthony Trollope

87. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

88. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

89. “There is such a difference between life and theory.”

— Anthony Trollope

90. “You men find so many angels in your travels. You have been honester than some. You have generally been off with the old angel before you were with the new, as far at least as I knew.”

— Anthony Trollope

91. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

92. “The apostle of Christianity and the infidel can meet without a chance of a quarrel; but it is never safe to bring together two men who differ about a saint or a surplice.”

— Anthony Trollope

93. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

94. “A fellow oughtn’t to let his family property go to pieces.”

— Anthony Trollope

95. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

96. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

97. “Mrs Grantly after her father’s death. This matter, therefore, had been taken out of the warden’s hands.”

— Anthony Trollope

98. “Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it.”

— Anthony Trollope

99. “He knew her to be heartless; but even heartless people have hearts which can be touched and almost broken by certain sorrows.”

— Anthony Trollope

100. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope