Top 400 Anthony Trollope Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable.”

— Anthony Trollope

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “As a general rule, it is highly desirable that ladies should keep their temper: a woman when she storms always makes herself ugly, and usually ridiculous also. There is nothing so odious to man as a virago. Though Theseus loved an Amazon, he showed his love but roughly, and from the time of Theseus downward, no man ever wished to have his wife remarkable rather for forward prowess than retiring gentleness. A low voice “is an excellent thing in woman.”

— Anthony Trollope

272. “But she knew this, – that it was necessary for her happiness that she should devote herself to some one. All the elegancies and outward charms of life were delightful, if only they could be used as the means to some end. As an end themselves they were nothing.”

— Anthony Trollope

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

279. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

286. “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

287. “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

288. “No; – I do not think that. But her temper is so ungovernable, and she has, if I may say so, been so spoilt among you here, – I mean by the girls, of course, – that she does not know how to restrain herself.”

— Anthony Trollope

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “When one wants to be natural, of necessity one becomes the reverse of natural.”

— Anthony Trollope

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

— Anthony Trollope

294. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Anthony Trollope

300. “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