Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 9

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

— Anthony Trollope

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

271. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

282. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

292. “These leave-takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory.”

— Anthony Trollope

293. “Rest and quiet are the comforts of those who have been content to remain in obscurity.”

— Anthony Trollope

294. “Who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself?”

— Anthony Trollope

295. “A man who desires to soften another man’s heart, should always abuse himself. In softening a woman’s heart, he should abuse her.”

— Anthony Trollope

296. “When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.”

— Anthony Trollope

297. “Frank and Mary had been so much together in his holidays, had so constantly consorted together as boys and girls, that, as regarded her, he had not that innate fear of a woman which represses a young man’s tongue; and she was so used to his good-humour, his fun, and high jovial spirits, and was, withal, so fond of them and him, that it was very difficult for her to mark with accurate feeling, and stop with reserved brow, the shade of change from a boy’s liking to a man’s love.”

— Anthony Trollope

298. “The rising in life of our familiar friends is, perhaps, the bitterest morsel of the bitter bread which we are called upon to eat in life.”

— Anthony Trollope

299. “A man’s love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit.”

— Anthony Trollope

300. “And I think that when once he had learned the art of arranging his words as he stood upon his legs, and had so mastered his voice as to have obtained the ear of the House, the work of his life was not difficult.”

— Anthony Trollope