Anthony Trollope

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

“It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.”

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

“I do not know that Lady Glencora's heart was made of that stern stuff which refuses to change its impressions; but it was a heart, and it required food. To love and fondle someone, - to be loved and fondled, were absolutely necessary to her happiness. She wanted the little daily assurance of her supremacy in the man's feelings, the constant touch of love, half accidental half contrived, the passing glance of the eye telling perhaps of some little joke understood only between them two rather than of love, the softness of an occasional kiss given here and there when chance might bring them together, some half-pretended interest in her little doings, a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, or even a pout.”

“But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,--cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.”

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

“It is necessary to get a lot of men together, for the show of the thing, otherwise the world will not believe. That is the meaning of committees. But the real work must always be done by one or two men.”

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

“Never think that you're not good enough. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

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

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

“But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.”

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

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

“When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.”

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

“Since woman's rights have come up a young woman is better able to fight her own battle.”

“My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.”

“The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.”

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