Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Love is involuntary. It does not often run in a yoke with prudence.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

253. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

262. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

268. “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

269. “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

270. “I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.”

— Anthony Trollope

271. “He was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so.”

— Anthony Trollope

272. “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

273. “I ain’t a bit ashamed of anything.”

— Anthony Trollope

274. “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

275. “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.”

— Anthony Trollope

276. “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

277. “Dr Grantly would be ready enough to take up his cudgel against all comers on behalf of the church militant, but he would do so on the distasteful ground of the church’s infallibility. Such a contest would give no comfort to Mr Harding’s doubts. He was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so.”

— Anthony Trollope

278. “Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable.”

— Anthony Trollope

279. “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

280. “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

281. “It is said by many who have had to deal with boys, that certain among them claim and obtain ascendancy by the spirit within them; but I doubt whether the ascendancy is not rather thrust on them than claimed by them. Here again I think the outward gait of the boy goes far towards obtaining for him the submission of his fellows.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

283. “Men will love to the last, but they love what is fresh and new. A woman’s love can live on the recollection of the past, and cling to what is old and ugly.”

— Anthony Trollope

284. “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

285. “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

286. “A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you’d like to get.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

288. “With the rich, experience has already taught him that a different line of action is necessary. Men in the upper walks of life do not mind being cursed, and the women, presuming that it be done in delicate phrase, rather like it.”

— Anthony Trollope

289. “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

290. “Never let the estate decrease in your hands. It is only by such resolutions as that that English noblemen and English gentlemen can preserve their country. I cannot bear to see property changing hands.”

— Anthony Trollope

291. “The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.”

— Anthony Trollope

292. “There are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been.”

— Anthony Trollope

293. “I don’t care twopence who have their way,” said Lucinda, “I mean to have mine; – that’s all.”

— Anthony Trollope

294. “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

295. “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

296. “A Minister can always give a reason; and, if he be clever, he can generally when doing so punish the man who asks for it. The punishing of an influential enemy is an indiscretion; but an obscure questioner may often be crushed with good effect.”

— Anthony Trollope

297. “He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.”

— Anthony Trollope

298. “On those days Lucinda kept as much as she could out of Sir Griffin’s way, and almost snapped at the baronet when he spoke to her. Sir Griffin swore to himself that he wasn’t going to be treated that way. He’d have her, by George! There are men in whose love a good deal of hatred is mixed; – who love as the huntsman loves the fox, towards the killing of which he intends to use all his energies and intellects.”

— Anthony Trollope

299. “And then he painted to himself a not untrue picture of the probable miseries of a man who begins life too high up on the ladder, – who succeeds in mounting before he has learned how to hold on when he is aloft.”

— Anthony Trollope

300. “We all profess to believe when we’re told that this world should be used merely as a preparation for the next; and yet there is something so cold and comfortless in the theory that we do not relish the prospect even for our children.”

— Anthony Trollope