Quotes by Anthony Trollope

You are quite wrong about him, Felix had said. He has not been atan English school, or English university, and therefore is not like other young men that you know; but he is, I think, well educated and clever. As for conceit, what man will do any good who is notconceited? Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinionof himself.All the same, my dear fellow, I do not like Lucius Mason.

The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.

A novelists characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

Dont let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.

People seem to think that if a man is a Member of Parliament he may do what he pleases. ... Being in Parliament used to be something when I was young, but it wont make a make a gentleman now-a-days. It seems to me that none but brewers, and tallow-chandlers, and lawyers go into Parliament now.

A womans weapon is her tongue.

The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because they are so good.

Poor Mr. Smith, having been so rudely dragged from his high horse, was never able to mount it again, and completed the lecture in a manner not at all comfortable to himself.

There is no such mischievous nonsense in all the world as equality. That is what father says. What men ought to want is liberty.

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

And, above all things, never think that youre 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.

There is nothing in the world so difficult as that task of making up ones mind. 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.

You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men an women upon the earth

Oh! do look at Miss Oriels 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.

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

Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, Women grow on the sunny side of the wall.

It was a beautiful summer afternoon, at that delicious period of the year when summer has just burst forth from the growth of spring; when the summer is yet but three days old, and all the various shades of green which nature can put forth are still in their unsoiled purity of freshness.

Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.

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

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.