Anthony Trollope

“The more she was absolutely in need of external friendship, the more disposed was she to reject it, and to declare to herself that she was prepared to stand alone in the world.”

“What is there that money will not do?”

“There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.”

“High rank and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself,—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself.”

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

“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.”

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

“I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.”

“I sometimes think you despise poetry,' said Phineas. 'When it is false I do. The difficulty is to know when it is false and when it is true.”

“It is probable that Tom Towers considered himself the most powerful man in Europe; and so he walked on from day to day, studiously striving to look a man, but knowing within his breast that he was a god.”

“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.”

“They are best dressed, whose dress no one observes.”

“There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.”

“And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.”

“This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.”