Quotes from Barchester Towers

Anthony Trollope ·  418 pages

Rating: (12K votes)


“Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“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.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“The greatest mistake any man ever made is to suppose that the good things of the world are not worth the winning.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers



“Her virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“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.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge?”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“If a husband be not master of his wife´s heart, he has no right to her fealty; if a wife ceases to love, she may cease to be true.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“These leave-takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers



“She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never descended to construct a decoration.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“Few men do understand the nature of a woman’s heart till years have robbed such understanding of its value.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“He possessed the tact of becoming instantly intimate with women without giving rise to any fear of impertinence. He had about him somewhat of the propensities of a tame cat. It seemed quite natural that he should be petted, caressed, and treated with familiar good nature, and that in return he should purr, and be sleek and graceful, and above all never show his claws. Like other tame cats, however, he had his claws, and sometimes made them dangerous.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“As a general rule, it is highly desirable that ladies should keep their temper: a woman when she storms always makes herself ugly, and usually ridiculous also. There is nothing so odious to man as a virago. Though Theseus loved an Amazon, he showed his love but roughly, and from the time of Theseus downward, no man ever wished to have his wife remarkable rather for forward prowess than retiring gentleness. A low voice "is an excellent thing in woman.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers



“Morning parties, as a rule, are failures. People never know how to get away from them gracefully.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“Olivia Proudie, however, was a girl of spirit: she had the blood of two peers in her veins, and better still she had another lover on her books, so Mr. Slope sighed in vain, and the pair soon found it convenient to establish a mutual bond of inveterate hatred.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“Wars about trifles are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new era, an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh—or else beware the cart.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“The author now leaves him in the hands of his readers: not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man, without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers



“There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“Sir Lamda Mewnew and Sir Omicron Pie,”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“Poor Eleanor! I cannot say that with me John Bold was ever a favourite.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“I like everything old-fashioned," said Eleanor; "old-fashioned things are so much the honestest.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers



“Believe me, my child, that Christian ministers are never called on by God's word to insult the convictions, or even the prejudices of their brethren, and that religion is at any rate not less susceptible of urbane and courteous conduct among men than any other study which men may take up.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“The great family characteristic of the Stanhopes might probably be said to be heartlessness, but this want of feeling was, in most of them, accompanied by so great an amount of good nature as to make itself but little noticeable to the world. They were so prone to oblige their neighbours that their neighbours failed to perceive how indifferent to them was the happiness and well-being of those around them. The Stanhopes would visit you in your sickness (provided it were not contagious), would bring you oranges, French novels, and the last new bit of scandal, and then hear of your death or your recovery with an equally indifferent composure.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“Having a comfortable allowance from his father, he could devote the whole proceeds of his curacy to violet gloves and unexceptionable neck ties.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“All Barchester was in a tumult. Dr. Grantly could hardly get himself out of the cathedral porch before he exploded in his wrath.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers


“We English gentlemen hate the name of a lie, but how often do we find public men who believe each other's words?”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Barchester Towers



About the author

Anthony Trollope
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date April 24, 1815
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