Quotes About Victorian Life

#1. I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter.

Freddie Mercury

#2. Visitors come and go.
Daily I read tea leaves for signs
of the approaching century:
a raven perched on a cross
a sword piercing a cloud
A Victorian Life

Clara Blackwood

#3. The course of George St. Leger Grenfell's life was a continuing act of violence against the sanctities of Victorian life, and especially against its inmost essence, the family. And indeed, the large Grenfell family was an overpowering aggregation, even by the ample Victorian standard.

Stephen Z. Starr

#4. Where there's life, there's learning, and the truth is always calling us out of our pride. If we don't harken, it will call louder, and throw a situation at us. A pebble at first. If we still don't listen, we'll get a stone. Then a rock. Then a great crashing boulder. We must learn, or die.

Orna Ross

#5. Worry more about your conscience than your reputation. Because your conscience is what you are, your reputation is what others think of you. And what others think of you is their problem.

Charlie Chaplin

#6. Thrift is not some obsolete Victorian notion ... It will be the difference between those who prosper and achieve respect and those who become a burden to their children and society.

Peter George Peterson

#7. The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.

Frederick Buechner

#8. Napoleon, who had an aversion to the moral laxity of the eighteenth century, which he blamed on the domination of society by women, was determined to reform family life on Roman, or perhaps rather on Corsican, principles. It was with him, not with Queen Victoria, that Victorian morality originated.

J. Christopher Herold

#9. No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines
ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives ...

Marisha Pessl

#10. The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.

D. A. Carson

#11. I'm going to take Charity to France. I can look after her there. You can go on with your life here, and I won't be here to ... to bother anyone."
He muttered two quiet words.
"What?" she asked in bewilderment, inching forward to hear him.
"I said, try it.

Lisa Kleypas

#12. In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.

Ashley Montagu

#13. The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Salman Rushdie

#14. Nope. He lives over in Boca Raton." "Oh fuck, Red." "I know, it's hor'ble. That's how come the five hundred a day.

Carl Hiaasen

#15. Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!

Charles Dickens

#16. Here lies Gomez Addams
he was good for nothing.

Jack Sharkey

#17. Religion has deprived us of virtues.

Sunday Adelaja

#18. I've come back for you, my love, my life. Let me look at you, keep you, never let go of you.

Sandra Byrd

#19. John had been a footman nearly all of his adult life. He knew decorum and appropriate behavior for his situation. But when he glanced from one twin to another, he nearly ruined his reputation and self-respect forever with...a smile.

Sarah Brazytis

#20. Marriage, after all, is only a little detail in life.

Orna Ross

#21. And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.

Charles Dickens

#22. I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.

Ralph Fiennes

#23. I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

Simon Callow

#24. Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#25. Only in dreams and death can perfection be had. Life is broken and weary.

Orna Ross

#26. You are being suffocated by tradition ... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art
it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.

Kurt Vonnegut

#27. Like herbs in a pestle, life steadily ground out the essence of those who did not have access to comforts.

Sandra Byrd

#28. When I was growing up, my mother was always a friend to my siblings and me (in addition to being all the other things a mom is), and I was always grateful for that because I knew she was someone I could talk to and joke with, and argue with and that nothing would ever harm that friendship.

Marlo Thomas

#29. My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.

Alan Bradley

#30. Well, we're grasping for two things at once. Partly for communion with others - that's the deepest instinct in us. And partly, we're seeking security. By constant communion with others we hope we shall be able to accept the horrible fact of our total solitude.

Ingmar Bergman

#31. Self acceptance is common, Unfortunately, for some daft reason you are expected to have some kind of psychology degree to learn it.

Auliq Ice

#32. Dear soulmate,
I don't know who you are, where you live, or what you look like. But I pray for you every nite and I ask God to point you in my direction.

Frank Warren

#33. The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

Robert Gottlieb

#34. I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly.

Jane Austen

#35. Poor thing, consigned to a life of frivolousness and wretched things for breakfast. Not allowed to go to school or do anything worthwhile, and eel pie besides.

Connie Willis

#36. I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.

Harold Prince