Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Then Mrs. Grantly, working hard in her vocation as a peacemaker, changed the conversation again, and began to talk of the American war. But even that was made matter of discord on church matters, – the archdeacon professing an opinion that the Southerners were Christian gentlemen, and the Northerners infidel snobs; whereas Mrs. Proudie had an idea that the Gospel was preached with genuine zeal in the Northern States.”

— Anthony Trollope

152. “When any practice has become the fixed rule of the society in which we live, it is always wise to adhere to that rule, unless it call upon us to do something that is actually wrong. One should not offend the prejudices of the world, even if one is quite sure that they are prejudices.”

— Anthony Trollope

153. “I don’t want no notoriety. I wants to earn my bread peaceable, and to be let alone when I’m about my own business. I pays rates for the police to look after rogues, not to haul folks about and lock ’em up for days and nights, who is doing what they has a legal right to do.”

— Anthony Trollope

154. “Rights and rules, which are bonds of iron to a little man, are packthread to a giant.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

156. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

158. “But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it?”

— Anthony Trollope

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Courtesty and cordiality are not only not the same, but they are incompatible. Why so? Courtesy is an effort, and cordiality is free.”

— Anthony Trollope

162. “Well, then, I’ll hope in this case. But, uncle – ” “Well, my dear?” “I want your opinion, truly and really. If you were a girl – ” “I am perfectly unable to give any opinion founded on so strange an hypothesis.”

— Anthony Trollope

163. “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

164. “A man who is supposed to have caused a disturbance between two married people, in a certain rank of life, does generally receive a certain meed of admiration.”

— Anthony Trollope

165. “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

166. “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

167. “I would recommend all men in choosing a profession to avoid any that may require an apology at every turn; either an apology or else a somewhat violent assertion of right.”

— Anthony Trollope

168. “To oblige a friend by inflicting an injury on his enemy is often more easy than to confer a benefit on the friend himself.”

— Anthony Trollope

169. “And you know, aunt, I still hope that I shall be found to have kept on the right side of the posts. You will find that poor Lord Chiltern is not so black as he is painted.’ ‘But why take anybody that is black at all?’ ‘I like a little shade in the picture, aunt.”

— Anthony Trollope

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

173. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

174. “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

175. “The form and face of Lady Eustace, which indeed were very lovely, were distasteful to her; whereas she delighted to look upon the broad, plain, colourless countenance of Lydia Fawn, who was endeared to her by frank good humour and an unselfish disposition. In regard to men she had never asked herself the question whether this man was handsome or that man ugly.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

177. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

180. “Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.”

— Anthony Trollope

181. “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

182. “As will so often be the case when a men has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer, in using which, either for defence or attack, a man can hardly measure the strength of the blows he gives.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

185. “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

186. “There is the review intended to sell a book, – which comes out immediately after the appearance of the book, or sometimes before it; the review which gives reputation, but does not affect the sale, and which comes a little later; the review which snuffs a book out quietly; the review which is to raise or lower the author a single peg, or two pegs, as the case may be; the review which is suddenly to make an author, and the review which is to crush him.”

— Anthony Trollope

187. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

189. “Of course there was.” “Of course there was. And Eugene Aram, when he murdered a man in Bulwer’s novel, turned the matter over in his mind before he did it?”

— Anthony Trollope

190. “But women can bear anything better than desertion. Cruelty is bad, but neglect is worse than cruelty, and desertion worse even than neglect.”

— Anthony Trollope

191. “Love is involuntary. It does not often run in a yoke with prudence.”

— Anthony Trollope

192. “Never mingle love and business.”

— Anthony Trollope

193. “It cannot, however, be said that this Petruchio had as yet tamed his own peculiar shrew. Lucinda was as savage as ever, and would snap and snarl, and almost bite.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

195. “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

196. “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

197. “People go on quarrelling and fancying this and that, and thinking that the world is full of romance and poetry. When they get married they know better.”

— Anthony Trollope

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Anthony Trollope

199. “Her virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.”

— Anthony Trollope

200. “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