My Victorian Year #1

This week I've been reading Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1860). It is the fourth novel in the Barsetshire series.

Quotes:

• It is true that one must put up with wrong, with a great deal of wrong. But no one need put up with wrong that he can remedy.
• You clergymen like to keep those long subjects for your sermons, when no one can answer you.
• It is no doubt very wrong to long after a naughty thing. But nevertheless we all do so. One may say that hankering after naughty things is the very essence of the evil into which we have been precipitated by Adam’s fall. When we confess that we are all sinners, we confess that we all long after naughty things.
• Friends are not to be picked up on the road-side every day; nor are they to be thrown away lightly.
• When those we love are dead, our friends dread to mention them, though to us who are bereaved no subject would be so pleasant as their names. But we rarely understand how to treat our own sorrow or those of others.
• A load which would crush a man at first becomes, by habit, not only endurable, but easy and comfortable to the bearer.
• A man always can do right, even though he has done wrong before. But that previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the path — a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.
• Spoken grief relieves itself; and when one can give counsel, one always hopes at least that that counsel will be effective.
• Let those who know clergymen, and like them, and have lived with them, only fancy it! Clergymen to be paid, not according to the temporalities of any living which they may have acquired, either by merit or favour, but in accordance with the work to be done!
• If the ears be too delicate to hear the truth, the mind will be too perverse to profit by it.
• Nobody can count on men from one week to another. The very members who in one month place a minister in power, are the very first to vote against him in the next.
• It is easy to love one’s enemy when one is making fine speeches; but so difficult to do so in the actual everyday work of life.
• Ah, you think that anything naked must be indecent; even truth.
• I think it is more proper-looking, and better suited, too, for the world’s work, when it goes about with some sort of a garment on it. We are so used to a leaven of falsehood in all we hear and say, nowadays, that nothing is more likely to deceive us than the absolute truth.

© 2018 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews