Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The greatest mistake any man ever made is to suppose that the good things of the world are not worth the winning.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “Young men in such matters are so often without any fixed thoughts! They are such absolute moths. They amuse themselves with the light of the beautiful candle, fluttering about, on and off, in and out of the flame with dazzled eyes, till in a rash moment they rush in too near the wick, and then fall with singed wings and crippled legs, burnt up and reduced to tinder by the consuming fire of matrimony. Happy marriages, men say, are made in heaven, and I believe it.”

— Anthony Trollope

208. “I know very well that men are friends when they step up and shake hands with each other. It is the same as when women kiss.” “When I see women kiss, I always think that there is deep hatred at the bottom of it.”

— Anthony Trollope

209. “No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader’s heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be, – truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.”

— Anthony Trollope

210. “When you have done the rashest thing in the world it is very pleasant to be told that no man of spirit could have acted otherwise.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

213. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

215. “The Sir Charles Grandison business is done and gone. That’s what you mean, I suppose? Don’t you think we should find it very heavy if we tried to get it back again?” “I’m not going to ask you to be a Sir Charles Grandison, Mr. Eames. But never mind all that now. Do you know that that girl has absolutely had her first sitting for the picture?”

— Anthony Trollope

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “Greystock brought with him two guns, two fishing-rods, a man-servant, and a huge hamper from Fortnum and Mason’s.”

— Anthony Trollope

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

231. “As he had said to his daughter, no one knows where the shoe pinches but the wearer. There are some points on which no man can be contented to follow the advice of another, – some subjects on which a man can consult his own conscience only. Our warden had made up his mind that it was good for him at any cost to get rid of this grievance; his daughter was the only person whose concurrence appeared necessary to him, and she did concur with him most heartily.”

— Anthony Trollope

232. “Wounds sometimes must be opened in order that they may be healed.”

— Anthony Trollope

233. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

234. “What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife?”

— Anthony Trollope

235. “The truth is so much more real when it comes from things that are near.”

— Anthony Trollope

236. “Upon my word, sir,’said he, ‘I’ve hardly looked at her. It is not a matter of looks now, as it used to be. It has got beyond that. It is not that I am indifferent to seeing a pretty face, or that I have no longer an opinion of my own about a woman’s figure. But there grows up, I think, a longing which almost kills that consideration.”

— Anthony Trollope

237. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

238. “She was not softly delicate in all her ways; but in disposition and temper she was altogether generous. I do not know that she was at all points a lady, but had Fate so willed it she would have been a thorough gentleman.”

— Anthony Trollope

239. “There is an aptness, a propriety, a fitness in these things which one can understand perhaps better than explain.”

— Anthony Trollope

240. “Lady Glencora in her time had wished to marry a man who had sought her for her money. Lady Chiltern in her time had refused to be Lady Fawn. Madame Goesler in her time had declined to marry an English peer.”

— Anthony Trollope

241. “I know they will murder him,” she said, “and then when it is too late they will find out what they have done!”

— Anthony Trollope

242. “There is no cholera, no yellow-fever, no small-pox more contagious than debt.”

— Anthony Trollope

243. “The secrets of the world are very marvellous, but they are not themselves half so wonderful as the way in which they become known to the world.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

245. “There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.”

— Anthony Trollope

246. “Little bits of things make me do it; – perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; – the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.”

— Anthony Trollope

247. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

248. “In judging of them, he judged leniently; the whole bias of his profession had taught him to think that they were more sinned against than sinning, and that the animosity with which they had been pursued was venomous and unjust; but he had not the less regarded their plight as most miserable.”

— Anthony Trollope

249. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

250. “Servants are wonderful actors, looking often as though they knew nothing when they know everything, – as though they understood nothing, when they understand all.”

— Anthony Trollope