“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”

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

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“Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.”

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

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“As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.”

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“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”

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“If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace, can get into Parliament and deal in millions, then there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable, that the dishonest after such a fashion are not just low scoundrels.”

from The Way We Live Now, 1875

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“the grain of sense is so smothered in a sack of the sheerest trash….He has one idea – a hatred of spoken and acted falsehood; and on this he harps”

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“Pride of place, and the power of living well in front of the world’s eye, are dear to us all; — are, doubtless, intended to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly.”

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“In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares.”

from Can You Forgive Her?

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“Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him.”

from The Way We Live Now, 1875

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“[A man] can admire, and he can like, and he can fondle and be fondled. He can admire and approve, and perhaps worship. He can know of a woman that she is part of himself, the most sacred part, and therefore will protect her from the very winds. But all that will not make love. It does not come to a man that to be separated from a woman is to be dislocated from his very self. A man has but one center, and that is himself. A woman has two. Though the second may never be seen by her, may live in the arms of another, may do all for that other that man can do for woman, -- still, still, though he be half the globe asunder from her, still he is to her the half of her existence. If she really love, there is, I fancy no end of it.”

from The Duke's Children

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“Then in this country a man is to be punished or not, according to his ability to fee a lawyer!”

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

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“That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen — makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest stage of degradation.”

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

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“Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent, of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself.... A race is fortunate when it has a good deal of the sort of imagination—of imaginative feeling—that had fallen to the share of Anthony Trollope”

— Henry James 1843 – 1916 CE

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