Anthony Trollope Quotes

345 Sourced Quotes

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

Anthony Trollope
Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music about affairs masculine and feminine, then take the leap in the dark.

Anthony Trollope
Make all men equal today, and God has so created them that they shall all be unequal tomorrow.

Anthony Trollope
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.

Anthony Trollope
The natural man will probably be manly. The affected man cannot be so.

Anthony Trollope
Men are so seldom really good. They are so little sympathetic. 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.

Anthony Trollope
Making love to a sweet, soft, blushing, willing, though silent girl is a pleasant employment; but the task of declaring love to a stony-hearted, obdurate, ill-conditions Diana is very disagreeable for any gentleman. And it is the more so when the gentleman really loves, — or thinks that he loves, — his Diana.

Anthony Trollope
I never believe anything that a lawyer says when he has a wig on his head and a fee in his hand. I prepare myself beforehand to regard it all as mere words, supplied at so much the thousand. I know he'll say whatever he thinks most likely to forward his own views.

Anthony Trollope
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
That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer teats his sheep and oxen — makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and a soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest state of degradation.

Anthony Trollope
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
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
I don't know about that. — A poet doesn't want to marry a poetess, nor a philosopher a philosopheress.

Anthony Trollope
"Aid from heaven you may have," he said, "by saying your prayers; and I don't doubt you ask for this and all other things generally. But an angel won't come to tell you who ought to be Chancellor of the Exchequer."

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

Anthony Trollope
When once a woman is married she should be regarded as having thrown off her allegiance to her own sex. She is sure to be treacherous at any rate in one direction.

Anthony Trollope
He possessed the rare merit of making a property of his time and not a burden.

Anthony Trollope
Power is so pleasant that men quickly learn to be greedy in the enjoyment of it, and to flatter themselves that patriotism requires them to be imperious.

Anthony Trollope
It's dogged as does it. It's not thinking about it.

Anthony Trollope
I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.

Anthony Trollope
As for conceit, what man will do any good who is not conceited? Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.

Anthony Trollope
Who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself?

Anthony Trollope
The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.

Anthony Trollope
Rights and rules, which are bonds of iron to a little man, are packthread to a giant.

Anthony Trollope
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