Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

253. “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

254. “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

255. “We must not be philosophical before her. Mamma, Major Grantly has – skedaddled.”

— Anthony Trollope

256. “Home to your own people. How nice! I have no people to go to. I have one sister, who lives with her husband at Riga. She is my only relation, and I never see her.”

— Anthony Trollope

257. “Mr Palliser was one of those politicians in possessing whom England has perhaps more reason to be proud than of any other of her resources, and who, as a body, give to her that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is her present strength and best security for the future.”

— Anthony Trollope

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.”

— Anthony Trollope

263. “Oh! do look at Miss Oriel’s bonnet the next time you see her. I cannot understand why it should be so, but I am sure of this – no English fingers could put together such a bonnet as that; and I am nearly sure that no French fingers could do it in England.”

— Anthony Trollope

264. “It was ludicrous and almost painful to see Mr Palliser wandering about and counting the boxes, as though he could do any good by that. At this special crisis of his life he hated his papers and figures and statistics, and could not apply himself to them. He, whose application had been so unremitting, could apply himself now to nothing. His world had been brought to an abrupt end, and he was awkward at making a new beginning. I believe that they all three were reading novels before one o’clock.”

— Anthony Trollope

265. “But the school in which good training is most practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars.”

— Anthony Trollope

266. “Both Lizzieites and anti-Lizzieites were disposed to think that Lizzie was very clever.”

— Anthony Trollope

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

270. “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

271. “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

272. “A man can’t do what he likes with his coverts.”

— Anthony Trollope

273. “Gentlemen lacking substantial sympathy with their leader found it to be comfortable to deceive themselves, and raise their hearts at the same time by the easy enthusiasm of noise.”

— Anthony Trollope

274. “There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.”

— Anthony Trollope

275. “I would carry you home, Mary, if it would do you a service,” said Frank, with considerable pathos in his voice. “Oh, dear me! pray do not, Mr Gresham. I should not like it at all,” said she: “a wheelbarrow would be preferable to that.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “For there is no folly so great as keeping one’s sorrows hidden.”

— Anthony Trollope

281. “But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.”

— Anthony Trollope

282. “I have all the world to choose from, but no reason whatever for a choice.”

— Anthony Trollope

283. “My dear, the least said the soonest mended,” said Mrs. French.”

— Anthony Trollope

284. “This kind of consolation from the world’s deceit is very common. Mothers obtain it from their children, and men from their dogs. Some men even do so from their walking-sticks, which is just as rational. How is it that we can take joy to ourselves in that we are not deceived by those who have not attained the art to deceive us?”

— Anthony Trollope

285. “That fighting of a battle without belief is, I think, the sorriest task which ever falls to the lot of any man.”

— Anthony Trollope

286. “A man’s own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to anyone else.”

— Anthony Trollope

287. “I know very well that if you get men who are really, really swells, for that is what it is, Mr. Low, and pay them well enough, and so make it really an important thing, they can browbeat any judge and hoodwink any jury.”

— Anthony Trollope

288. “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

289. “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

290. “He had never done any good, but he had always carried himself like a duke, and like a duke he carried himself to the end.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

292. “In former days the Earl had been a man quite capable of making himself disagreeable, and probably had not yet lost the power of doing so. Of all our capabilities this is the one which clings longest to us.”

— Anthony Trollope

293. “Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable.”

— Anthony Trollope

294. “The natural man will probably be manly. The affected man cannot be so.”

— Anthony Trollope

295. “I do not think myself to be a worm, and a grub, grass of the field fit only to be burned, a clod, a morsel of putrid atoms that should be thrown to the dungheap, ready for the nethermost pit. Nor if I did should I therefore expect to sit with Angels and Archangels.”

— Anthony Trollope

296. “It is no good any longer to have any opinion upon anything.”

— Anthony Trollope

297. “Perhaps also Roger felt that were he to take up the cudgels for an argument he might be worsted in the combat, as in such combats success is won by practised skill rather than by truth.”

— Anthony Trollope

298. “Dr. Tempest was well known among his parishioners to be hard and unsympathetic, some said unfeeling also, and cruel; but it was admitted by those who disliked him the most that he was both practical and just, and that he cared for the welfare of many, though he was rarely touched by the misery of one.”

— Anthony Trollope

299. “An editor is bound to avoid the meshes of the law, which are always infinitely more costly to companies, or things, or institutions, than they are to individuals.”

— Anthony Trollope

300. “Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.”

— Anthony Trollope