Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.
Anthony Trollope
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 royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.
Never think that you're not good enough. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.
Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.
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.
When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.
When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.
I ain't a bit ashamed of anything.
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.
Life is so unlike theory.
A man's mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.
Oxford is the most dangerous place to which a young man can be sent.
Cham is the only thing to screw one up when one is down a peg.
When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.
High rank and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart.
I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.
It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.
As to happiness in this life it is hardly compatible with that diminished respect which ever attends the relinquishing of labour.
There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.
No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.
When men think much, they can rarely decide.
The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.
What is there that money will not do?
Since woman's rights have come up a young woman is better able to fight her own battle.
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.
My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.
It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.
A woman's life is not perfect or whole till she has added herself to a husband. Nor is a man's life perfect or whole till he has added to himself a wife.
There are some achievements which are never done in the presence of those who hear of them. Catching salmon is one, and working all night is another.
It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.
A husband is very much like a house or a horse.
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.
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.
Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.
And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.
I do like a little romance... just a sniff, as I call it, of the rocks and valleys. Of course, bread-and-cheese is the real thing. The rocks and valleys are no good at all, if you haven't got that.
Wine is valued by its price, not its flavour.
I do not know whether there be, as a rule, more vocal expression of the sentiment of love between a man and a woman, than there is between two thrushes. They whistle and call to each other, guided by instinct rather than by reason.
In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.
I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.
I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.
Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.
Marvelous is the power which can be exercised, almost unconsciously, over a company, or an individual, or even upon a crowd by one person gifted with good temper, good digestion, good intellects, and good looks.
They are best dressed, whose dress no one observes.
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
