Anthony Trollope

An editor is bound to avoid the meshes of the law, which are always infinitely more costly to companies, or things, or institutions, than they are to individuals.

“Do you mean to say that the morals of your party will be offended?” said Madame Goesler, almost laughing.

When you have done the rashest thing in the world it is very pleasant to be told that no man of spirit could have acted otherwise.

I fancy that he will be a great statesman. After all, Mr. Finn, that is the best thing a man can be, unless it is given him to be a saint and a martyr and all that kind of thing, — which is not just what a mother looks for.

Flirting I take to be the excitement of love, without its reality, and without its ordinary result in marriage.

You men find so many angels in your travels. You have been honester than some. You have generally been off with the old angel before you were with the new, — as far at least as I knew.

When one wants to be natural, of necessity one becomes the reverse of natural.

Men are so seldom really good. They are so little sympathetic. What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

“But what made Miss Boreham turn nun?”

“I fancy she found the penances lighter than they were at home,” said the lord. “They couldn’t well be heavier.”

He is one of those men who, on marrying, assume that they have at last got a person to do a duty which has always hitherto been neglected.

As for offending him, you might as well swear at a tree, and think to offend it.

Then he would be penniless, with the world before him as a closed oyster to be again opened, and he knew, — no one better, — that this oyster becomes harder and harder in the opening as the man who has to open it becomes older.