Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

213. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

214. “After that I met that lawyer in the street, and was ashamed to look him in the face. I’m blessed if he didn’t come up and shake hands with me, and tell me that he knew all along that his client hadn’t a leg to stand on. Now I call that beautiful.” “Beautiful!” said Kenneby. “Yes, I do. He fought that battle just as if he was sure of winning, though he knew he was going to lose. Give me the man that can fight a losing battle. Anybody can play whist with four by honours in his own hands.”

— Anthony Trollope

215. “She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.”

— Anthony Trollope

216. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

219. “Wine is valued for its price, not its flavor.”

— Anthony Trollope

220. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

222. “What!” said his sensible enemies, “is Johnny not to be taught to read because he does not like it?” “Johnny must read by all means,” would the doctor answer; “but is it necessary that he should not like it? If the preceptor have it in him, may not Johnny learn, not only to read, but to like to learn to read?”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

225. “The castle itself was a huge brick pile, built in the days of William III., which, though they were grand days for the construction of the constitution, were not very grand for architecture of a more material description.”

— Anthony Trollope

226. “The circumstances seemed to be simple; but they who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

238. “Marry Oswald, and be your own mistress.” “I mean to be my own mistress without marrying Oswald, though I don’t see my way quite clearly as yet. I think I shall set up a little house of my own, and let the world say what it pleases. I suppose they couldn’t make me out to be a lunatic.”

— Anthony Trollope

239. “Morning parties, as a rule, are failures. People never know how to get away from them gracefully.”

— Anthony Trollope

240. “My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.”

— Anthony Trollope

241. “Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.”

— Anthony Trollope

242. “It is my purpose to disclose the mystery at once, and to ask you to look for your interest, – should you choose to go on with my chronicle, – simply in the conduct of my persons, during this disclosure to others.”

— Anthony Trollope

243. “When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.”

— Anthony Trollope

244. “Wars about trifles are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?”

— Anthony Trollope

245. “But are no other portraits necessary? Should we not be taught to see the men and women among whom we really live, – men and women such as we are ourselves, – in order that we should know what are the exact failings which oppress ourselves, and thus learn to hate, and if possible to avoid in life the faults of character which in life are hardly visible, but which in portraiture of life can be made to be so transparent.”

— Anthony Trollope

246. “What had passed between Eleanor Harding and Mary Bold need not be told. It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines, or how would three volumes or twenty suffice!”

— Anthony Trollope

247. “The happiest man is he, who being above the troubles which money brings, has his hands the fullest of work.”

— Anthony Trollope

248. “They who know the agonies of an ambitious, indolent, doubting, self-accusing man, – of a man who has a skeleton in his cupboard as to which he can ask for sympathy from no one, – will understand what feelings were at work within the bosom of Sir Thomas when his Percycross friends left him alone in his chamber.”

— Anthony Trollope

249. “That is to say, we think you cannot do so. People can do so many things that they don’t think they can do; and can’t do so many things that they think that they can do!”

— Anthony Trollope

250. “To get away well is so very much! And to get away well is often so very difficult!”

— Anthony Trollope