Anthony Trollope Quotes

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

Idle Jeffrey, when asking his cousin for money: "I fear I have not a mercenary tendency." The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his cousin, Plantagenet Palliser: "Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not have bred. The man who plows, so he may live, does so because, luckily, he has mercenary tendencies."Jeffrey: "Just so, but you see I am less lucky than the plowman."Palliser: "There is no vulgar error so vulgar, that is to say common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. The desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combines with honesty, and they cannot take you astray.

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

A woman's weapon is her tongue.

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 won't 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.

(On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man’s power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.

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

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.

And, 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.

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

A novelist's 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.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

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