Anthony Trollope Quotes

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

A man's mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

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.

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world.

It's dogged as does it. It ain't thinking about it.

Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

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

Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it.

Cham is the only thing to screw one up when one is down a peg.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

Oxford is the most dangerous place to which a young man can be sent.

My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.

They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him, have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind.

I ain't a bit ashamed of anything.

But mad people never die. That's a well-known fact. They've nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever.

A husband is very much like a house or a horse.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can't fly away.

It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.

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

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.

I believe journalism is coming to be regarded as quite a respectable occupation for gentlemen nowadays.

If we wish ourselves to be high, we should treat that which is over us as high.

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

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.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

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

The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.

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

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

As to happiness in this life it is hardly compatible with that diminished respect which ever attends the relinquishing of labour.

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.

It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.

Credit is a matter so subtle in its essence, that, as it may be obtained almost without reason, so, without reason, may it be made to melt away.

The happiest man is he, who being above the troubles which money brings, has his hands the fullest of work.

A pleasant letter I hold to be the pleasantest thing that this world has to give.

It is easy to love one's enemy when one is making fine speeches; but so difficult to do so in the actual everyday work of life.

My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.

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

Money is neither god nor devil, that it should make one noble and another vile. It is an accident, and if honestly possessed, may pass from you to me, or from me to you, without a stain.

Fortune favors the brave; and the world certainly gives the most credit to those who are able to give an unlimited credit to themselves.

There is such a difference between life and theory.

An enemy might at any time become a friend, but while an enemy was an enemy he should be trodden on and persecuted.