Life
Trollope shows a deep understanding for people and life.
If search for bread, and meat, and raiment, be set aside, then, beyond that, our happiness or misery here depends chiefly on success or failure in small things.
That which enables the avaricious and the unjust to pass scatheless through the world is not the ignorance of the world as to their sins, but the indifference of the world whether they be sinful or no.
That feeling of over-due bills, of bills coming due, of accounts overdrawn, of tradesmen unpaid, of general money cares, is very dreadful at first; but it is astonishing how soon men get used to it.
For the ordinary purposes of conversation a superficial knowledge of many things goes further than an intimacy with one or two.
The word that is written is a thing capable of permanent life, and lives frequently to the confusion of its parent. A man should make his confessions always by word of mouth if it be possible.
A man when he wishes to use burning words should use them while the words are on fire.
Whatever be the misery to be endured, get it over. The horror of every agony is in its anticipation.
Sit down and write your letter; write it with all the venom in your power; spit out your spleen at the fullest; 'twill do you good ... say all that you can say with all your poisoned eloquence, and gratify yourself by reading it while your temper is still hot. Then put it in your desk; and, as a matter of course, burn it before breakfast the following morning.
No one thinks of defending himself to a newspaper except an ass.
Fortune favours the brave; and the world certainly gives the most credit to those who are able to give an unlimited credit to themselves.
That I, or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible.
A man, when he undertakes to advise another, should not be down in the mouth himself.
It is very well to have friends to lean upon, but it is not always well to lean upon one's friends.
Remember, I do not recommend motion at all. Repose is my idea of life; repose and grapes.
Madame Max Goesler, Phineas Finn
Last days are wretched days; and so are last moments wretched moments. It is not the fact that the parting is coming which makes these days and moments so wretched but the feeling that something special is expected from them.
Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned.
She had lost, by constant dwelling on the subject, her power of seeing how the idea would strike the feelings of another person.
In such troubles nothing will give comfort. They must be bourne, till the fire of misfortune burns itself out.
A law suit will sometimes make a man extremely pleasant company to his wife and children. Even a losing lawsuit will sometimes do so, if he backed up in his pugnacity by his lawyer, and if the matter of the battle be one in which he can take a delight to fight.
It was not only that his heart was torn to pieces, but that he did not know how to look out into the world. It was as though a man should be suddenly called upon to live without hands or even arms.
