Anthony Trollope Quotes

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

“Of all needs a book has, the chief need is to be readable.”

“That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”

“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.”

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

“This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.”

“Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.”

“Few men do understand the nature of a woman’s heart till years have robbed such understanding of its value.”

“If a husband be not master of his wife´s heart, he has no right to her fealty; if a wife ceases to love, she may cease to be true.”

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

“Never mind love. After all, what is it? The dream of a few weeks. That is all its joy. The disappointment of a life is its Nemesis.”

“No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented.”

“Some men have a great gift of making money, but they can't spend it. Others can't put two shillings together, but they have a great talent for all sorts of outlay. I begin to think that my genius is wholly in the latter line.”

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

“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

“There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons.”

“Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.”

“Ah, you think that anything naked must be indecent; even truth.”

“But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it? Who at least ever declined a love secret? What sister could do so?”

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

“One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it.”

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

“When a man gets into his head an idea that the public voice calls for him, it is astonishing how great becomes his trust in the wisdom of the public.”

“A young man without an income cannot be accepted as a fitting suitor for a gentleman’s daughter.”

“Courtesty and cordiality are not only not the same, but they are incompatible. Why so? Courtesy is an effort, and cordiality is free.”

“Familiarity does breed contempt;—doesn’t it?”

“Idleness is the root of all evil.”

“Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.”

“Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.”

“Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who holds a low opinion of himself.”

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

“I hate a stupid man who can't talk to me, and I hate a clever man who talks me down. I don’t like a man who is too lazy to make any effort to shine; but I particularly dislike the man who is always striving for effect. I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth and all that kind of thing. A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can't show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.”

“It is seldom that we know anything accurately on any subject that we have not made matter of careful study.”

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

“Men who think much want to speak often.”

“There is nothing in the world so difficult as that task of making up one's mind.”

“We are very apt to think that we men and women understand one another; but most probably you know nothing even of the modes of thought of the man who lives next door to you.”

“When a man tells me that a horse is an armchair, I always tell him to put the brute into his bedroom.”

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

“Who is there that has not longed that the power and privilege of selection among alternatives should be taken away from him in some important crisis of his life, and that his conduct should be arranged for him, either this way or that, by some divine power if it were possible, - by some patriarchal power in the absence of divinity, - or by chance, even, if nothing better than chance could be found to do it? But no one dares to cast the die, and to go honestly by the hazard. There must be the actual necessity of obeying the die, before even the die can be of any use.”

“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.”

“Above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

“Can it be that any mother really expects her son to sit alone evening after evening in a dingy room drinking bad tea, and reading good books? And yet it seems that mothers do so expect.”

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

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

“Did you ever know a poor man made better by law or a lawyer?”

“It is much less difficult for the sufferer to be generous than for the oppressor.”

“What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee? Was ever anything so civil?”

“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything.”

“A woman's weapon is her tongue.”

“Every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter.”

“Her happiness, like that of most of us, was ever in the future — never reached but always coming.”

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

“If you pardon all the evil done to you, you encourage others to do you evil!”

“Land is a luxury, and of all luxuries is the most costly.”

“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”

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

“She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.”

“There is the review intended to sell a book, — which comes out immediately after the appearance of the book, or sometimes before it; the review which gives reputation, but does not affect the sale, and which comes a little later; the review which snuffs a book out quietly; the review which is to raise or lower the author a single peg, or two pegs, as the case may be; the review which is suddenly to make an author, and the review which is to crush him.”

“Those who depart must have earned such sorrow before it can be really felt.”

“Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him.”

“You can run down a demi-god only by making him out to be a demi-devil.”