Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I should give such advice myself, knowing that a friend may give counsel as to outer things, but that a man must satisfy his inner conscience by his own perceptions of what is right and what is wrong.”

— Anthony Trollope

152. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

153. “There are general laws current in the world as to morality. ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ for instance. That has “necessarily been current as a law through all nations. But the first man you meet in the street will have ideas about theft so different from yours, that, if you knew them as you know your own, you would say that this law and yours were not even founded on the same principle.”

— Anthony Trollope

154. “Loughshane, according to Barrington Erle, was so small a place, that the expense would be very little. There were altogether no more than 307 registered electors. The inhabitants were so far removed from the world, and were so ignorant of the world’s good things, that they knew nothing about bribery.”

— Anthony Trollope

155. “Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.”

— Anthony Trollope

156. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

157. “But mad people never die. That’s a well-known fact. They’ve nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever.”

— Anthony Trollope

158. “Fighting! There’s no fighting wanted, as you know well enough. Men don’t fight nowadays.”

— Anthony Trollope

159. “The best education is to be had at a price, as well as the best broadcloth.”

— Anthony Trollope

160. “I suppose there is an outside power, – the people, or public opinion, or whatever they choose to call it. And the country will have to go very much as that outside power chooses.”

— Anthony Trollope

161. “Flirting I take to be the excitement of love, without its reality, and without its ordinary result in marriage.”

— Anthony Trollope

162. “If a cook can’t make soup between two and seven, she can’t make it in a week.”

— Anthony Trollope

163. “They two men cut the door, and took the box, and opened it, – and when they’d opened it, they didn’t get the swag. Where was the swag?”

— Anthony Trollope

164. “If you pardon all the evil done to you, you encourage others to do you evil!”

— Anthony Trollope

165. “When last days are coming, they should be allowed to come and to glide away without special notice or mention. And as for last moments, there should be none such. Let them ever be ended, even before their presence has been acknowledged.”

— Anthony Trollope

166. “There are moments in which stupid people say clever things, obtuse people say sharp things, and good-natured people say ill-natured things.”

— Anthony Trollope

167. “But I have said it, and will say it again. I, poor, penniless, plain simple fool that I am, have been ass enough to love you, Lady Laura Standish; and I brought you up here to-day to ask you to share with me – my nothingness. And this I have done on soil that is to be all your own. Tell me that you regard me as a conceited fool, – as a bewildered idiot.”

— Anthony Trollope

168. “Though they were Liberals they were not democrats; nor yet infidels.”

— Anthony Trollope

169. “Jacob was not in such a hurry when he wished for Rachel.” “That was all very well for an old patriarch who had seven or eight hundred years to live.” “My dear John, you forget your Bible. Jacob did not live half as long as that.”

— Anthony Trollope

170. “A man may have the best of causes, the best of talents, and the best of tempers; he may write as well as Addison, or as strongly as Junius; but even with all this he cannot successfully answer, when attacked by The Jupiter. In such matters it is omnipotent. What the Czar is in Russia, or the mob in America, that The Jupiter is in England. Answer such an article! No, warden; whatever you do, don’t do that.”

— Anthony Trollope

171. “She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

173. “But as the clerical pretensions are more exacting than all others, being put forward with an assertion that no answer is possible without breach of duty and sin, so are they more galling.”

— Anthony Trollope

174. “True love, true friendship, true benevolence, true tenderness, were beautiful to her, – qualities on which she could descant almost with eloquence; and therefore she was always shamming love and friendship and benevolence and tenderness.”

— Anthony Trollope

175. “The double pleasure of pulling down an opponent, and of raising oneself, is the charm of a politician’s life.”

— Anthony Trollope

176. “It is seldom that we know anything accurately on any subject that we have not made matter of careful study,” said Mr. Monk, “and very often do not do so even then. We are very apt to think that we men and women understand one another; but most probably you know nothing even of the modes of thought of the man who lives next door to you.”

— Anthony Trollope

177. “Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel?”

— Anthony Trollope

178. “Then Lady Chiltern argued the matter on views directly opposite to those which she had put forward when discussing the matter with her husband.”

— Anthony Trollope

179. “The night was bright with stars, but there was no moon in the heavens, and the gloom of the ivy-coloured church tower was complete. But all the outlines of the place were so well known to him that he could trace them all in the dim light.”

— Anthony Trollope

180. “It was a beautiful summer afternoon, at that delicious period of the year when summer has just burst forth from the growth of spring; when the summer is yet but three days old, and all the various shades of green which nature can put forth are still in their unsoiled purity of freshness.”

— Anthony Trollope

181. “The bucolic mind of East Barsetshire took warm delight in the eloquence of the eminent personage who represented them, but was wont to extract more actual enjoyment from the music of his periods than from the strength of his arguments.”

— Anthony Trollope

182. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

183. “No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented.”

— Anthony Trollope

184. “What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.”

— Anthony Trollope

185. “It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

187. “I cannot hold with those who want to put down the insignificant chatter of the world.”

— Anthony Trollope

188. “Things to be done offer themselves, I suppose, because they are in themselves desirable; not because it is desirable to have something to do.”

— Anthony Trollope

189. “He possessed the rare merit of making a property of his time and not a burden.”

— Anthony Trollope

190. “Let me tell you, Lady Glencora, that a faineant government is not the worst government that England can have. It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.”

— Anthony Trollope

191. “Power is so pleasant that men quickly learn to be greedy in the enjoyment of it, and to flatter themselves that patriotism requires them to be imperious. She would be constant with him day and night to make him understand that his duty to his country required him to be in very truth its chief ruler.”

— Anthony Trollope

192. “Publish what, you unreasonable man?” “Man! sir; whom do you call a man? I’ll let you know whether I’m a man – post-chaise there!” “Don’t ‘ee call him names now, doctor; don’t ‘ee, pray don’t ‘ee,” said Lady Scatcherd. By this time they had all got somewhere nearer the hall-door; but the Scatcherd retainers were too fond of the row to absent themselves willingly at Dr Fillgrave’s bidding, and it did not appear that any one went in search of the post-chaise.”

— Anthony Trollope

193. “We English gentlemen hate the name of a lie, but how often do we find public men who believe each other’s words?”

— Anthony Trollope

194. “It is the necessary nature of a political party in this country to avoid, as long as it can be avoided, the consideration of any question which involves a great change.”

— Anthony Trollope

195. “It was true, however, that he sometimes startled his hearers by things which might have been considered to border on coarseness if they had not been said by a clergyman.”

— Anthony Trollope

196. “But Mr. Daubeny, as soon as he had made his statement, stalked out of the House, and no reply whatever was made to the independent Members. Some few sublime and hot-headed gentlemen muttered the word “impeachment.” Others, who were more practical and less dignified, suggested that the Prime Minister “ought to have his head punched.”

— Anthony Trollope

197. “A man who lives much at a club is apt to fall into a selfish mode of life. He is taught to think that his own comfort should always be the first object. A man can never be happy unless his first objects are outside himself. Personal self-indulgence begets a sense of meanness which sticks to a man even when he has got beyond all hope of rescue.”

— Anthony Trollope

198. “Sympathy may, no doubt, be conveyed by letter; but there are things on which it is almost impossible for any writer to express himself with adequate feeling; and there are things, too, which can be spoken, but which cannot be written.”

— Anthony Trollope

199. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope