Victorian Age Quotes

I've always been drawn to the Edwardian period in England. To me, it seems like such a fascinating time, when the British Empire was at the height of its powers and the strict mores of the Victorian age were dissipating into the decadence of King Edward's reign. ~ Kevin Kwan

I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I've walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes.
I've brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking. ~ Chila Woychik

The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope. ~ Bertrand Russell

Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves' quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path. ~ John Fowles

What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective. ~ Bertrand Russell

It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis. ~ Bill Bryson

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. ~ Alfred Tennyson

She is still forming her conclusions but, above all, is convinced that their actions are borne of instinct: fixed patterns that take them to their source of food, to their safe havens, to their mates, and, ultimately, to their death, since their predators learn these patterns as surely as if they, too, had read Maud's book. ~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism. ~ Gunnar Myrdal

All the comics are sigils. "Sigil" as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic. ~ Grant Morrison

The cook says, 'As a young lass, I thought nothing as important as the love of a brave and 'andsome man; now I'm an old crone, I know full well that it is, but only when he's moneyed enough to keep you. The young may think they can live on sweet embraces but they won't fill your belly – or not as you may be intending at any rate! ~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

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

The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this:

'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!'

Those were the days.

(introduction to "The Weird Woman") ~ Hugh Lamb

They passed a succession of granite monuments to the conquering magicians of the late Victorian age and the fallen heroes of the Great War, then a few monolithic sculptures representing Ideal Virtues (Patriotism, Respect for Authority, the Dutiful Wife). ~ Jonathan Stroud

The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples. ~ George Edward Woodberry

One of the very few valid criticisms of Queen Victoria is that she was not sufficiently concerned with improvement of the conditions in which a great mass of her subjects passed their lives. She lived through an age of profound social change, but neither public health, nor housing, nor the education of her people, nor their representation, engaged much of her time. ~ Cecil Woodham-Smith

If only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn't lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn't matter to us, the Great War might never have happened. ~ Vera Brittain

My son is getting close to the age that I remember watching Scrooge, and as he loves to be scared, I can't wait to start my favorite holiday tradition all over again with him. ~ Molly O'Keefe

Of course his name would be Dominic. It meant "gift from God." AKA a life-support system for an ego. Still, that didn't mean he wasn't fun to stare at. Dominic Rossi looked like a dream, the kind of dream no woman in her right mind would want to wake from.
She had always been susceptible to male beauty, ever since the age of ten, when her mother had taken her to see Michelangelo's David in Florence. She recalled staring at that huge stone behemoth, all lithe muscles and gorgeous symmetry, indifferent about his nudity, his member inspiring a dozen questions her mother brushed aside. ~ Susan Wiggs

All socio-political phenomena in the U.K. come laden with the baggage of a class-based theory or two attached to them. In the case of gay Tories, there is one particularly silly variant of the category, which asserts that gayness is bred in public schools and thus fits with Conservatism like hand in glove. ~ Evan Davis

Miss Pringle was not much larger than the handheld personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West's Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Tell yourself the stories you need to tell. But don't be fooled by them. Never live your own lies. ~ David Gaider

In life you'll face difficulties that postpone some of your dreams. Regardless, life goes fast by reminding us youth is finite and old age is stable. So you mustn't stop dreaming and running while your strength is yet tough. ~ Darmie Orem

A rush age cannot be a reflective age. ~ Ronald Knox

I really believe great actors, even with disease and age, can be great. ~ Olivier Martinez

The most amazing thing about the Christmas story is its relevance. It is at home in every age and fits into every mood of life. It is not simply a lovely tale once told, but eternally contemporary. It is the voice crying out in every wilderness. It is as meaningful in our time as in that long-ago night when shepherds followed the light of the star to the manger of Bethlehem. ~ Joseph R. Sizoo

O Youth! flame earnest, still aspire, With energies immortal! To many a heaven of Desire, Our yearning opes a portal! And tho' Age wearies by the way, And hearts break in the furrow, We'll sow the golden grain Today
The Harvest comes tomorrow. ~ Gerald Massey

I wear my age with pride. ~ Tyra Banks

This is what I asked for, and in this day and age that's what actually goes on. But what hurts me the most is that I work just as hard as any other actress around my age, like Scarlett Johansson, but I just don't get the opportunities that they get because people are so distracted by the mess that I created in my life. ~ Lindsay Lohan

Ding! Ding! Ding! I tapped the brass bell in rapid succession until Violet bustled in from the back room, wearing the blue-and-white pinafore that was the SugarWerks's uniform and a frown that was not. The same age as Nic and I, Violet wore her amethyst hair spiked and a brass gearring stud on the left side of her nose. On one set of knuckles, BAKE was tattooed in elaborate black calligraphy; CAKE was on the other. Today she had an aquamarine bow pinned to the top of her head, a silver cupcake and crossbones marking the spot between the two loops of ribbon. ~ Lisa Mantchev

Lat, urbes constituit aetas: hora dissolvit: momento fit cinis: diu sylva.
An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them. In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing. ~ Seneca.

You would think that I'd be a bit more comfortable talking about sex, now that I'd had it and all. You would also think that at my age I would be able to successfully insert the straw into a Capri sun juice pouch. I was 0-2 there. ~ Cora Carmack

...waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. ~ Bertrand Russell

A hothouse flower trained to bloom out of season and in the wrong climate. I do not belong. ~ Karen Levy

A harmonic, forward-looking approach to practice governance discipline has to be put at the heart of corporate board in the digital age. ~ Pearl Zhu

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else. ~ Lascelles Abercrombie

It is the truth which is assailed in any age which tests our fidelity. It is to confess we are called, not merely to profess. If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point. ~ Elizabeth Rundle Charles

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Any young man coming of age has a lot to go through. Peter Parker certainly has a lot of responsibility, and without doubt, so does Pippin - his role, his life, and how he is going to perform it. It's all about choices and how we make them. ~ Matthew James Thomas

If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up - with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction.43 In ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Of all the lessons history teaches, this one is the plainest: the person who tries to achieve ends through force is always unscrupulous and is always cruel. We should remember this in an age where morality seems to be disappearing and is being replaced by politics. ~ Eustace Percy, 1st Baron Percy Of Newcastle

Surely this new age is not a repudiation of, but a fulfillment of, the American dream. What were the machines for, unless to give man a new freedom to choose how he would live? ~ Charles A. Reich

Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still. ~ Ann Brashares

Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making uneartly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood we seldom quarrelled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of thos brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation. ~ Vera Brittain

Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages. ~ Camille Paglia

The nice thing about age is worrying less and less about what people think. ~ Ben Folds

Today the story is no less attitude-adjusting. It is about the defining cultural, social and political issue of our age. It is about human transformation. ~ Joel Garreau

Leisure is not a relevant notion. Consider the weariness that often afflicts your kind, late in their lives. Then multiply that countless times. This is the burden of being long-lived. ~ Steven Erikson

If I had tried the Olympics any younger, I wouldn't have been as prepared as I am right now. But there are definitely a ton of juniors out there, all around the world and in the USA, that if there was no age limit, they could definitely make the Olympic team. ~ Aly Raisman