Victorian Society Quotes & Sayings

Just because something can reproduce, that doesn't mean it should reproduce. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Without a word, my dog taught me the meaning of love. — Leila Grandemange

I'm like a stuffed toy. You've never met me, but if you did, you'd just want to take me home and put me in your child's room. — Richard Simmons

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return. — Anne Lamott

Wisdom is the mind what health is to the body. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

It is impossible to determine precisely how many Victorians were dependent on the drug, but since millions used it on a daily basis, the number must have been considerable. The pallor of many women in the middle and upper classes, their frequent lack of appetite, their tendency to faint and to spend considerable time alone in dark rooms, the ornate patterns of overupholstered and overfurnished rooms, the persistently closed, thick draperies - these are evidence of a national dependency that the restraints of Victorian society discouraged anyone from discussing. — David Morrell

Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ. — Kenneth Rexroth

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

There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country's first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device. — Russell Shorto

It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small, and the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all. — Idina Menzel

One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'. — Neal Stephenson

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

When your words are kind and loving, it heals the mind and fills it with happiness and joy. — Debasish Mridha

Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by
themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for
ordinary mortals to attempt to range them in order of merit. — Eric Temple Bell

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over. — Connie Willis

'Calcutta is a pot of honey' means that in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the society became truly Victorian in feeling and tone, Bengal was a place to make money. The governor-generals returned to England rich men. It was a bountiful, lush, prosperous, easy place to make a fortune - in coal, in jute, and particularly cloth. — Susanna Moore

If I have to make a tackle then I have already made a mistake. — Paolo Maldini

the road is difficult. - But come; loss now will be gain then! To wait is harder than to run, and its meed is the fuller. — George MacDonald

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Some ministers are fond of talking about a return to Victorian values. We must realise that those Victorian values are being expressed by some of the younger people in this society in shameful and disturbing disregard for other members of their generation who are not as fortunate as they are in having a job. — Charles Kennedy

We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us. — A. N. Wilson

No, the events which I am about to describe were simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print. They still are. It is no exaggeration to suggest that they would tear apart the entire fabric of society and, particularly at a time of war, this is something I cannot risk. — Anthony Horowitz

I don't look at myself as one of the best pitchers in the world. — Masahiro Tanaka

Tea no more! Down with bustles! — Nancy Moser

In all times and in all places
in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, ... medieval France,Babylonia, ... Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, ... Dresden
the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue
that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals. — Louise J. Kaplan

In the world of The Age of Innocence, a financial disaster or moral scandal would permanently exile a guest from the finest dinner tables. In contemporary New York, a mere change of fashion can eliminate a place setting; therefore, the need to maintain a rigidity not of morals, but of taste, seems all the more desperate. — Wendy Wasserstein

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society. — Thomas Hardy

The border between good and evil passes not outside of us but within us — Pope Francis

Because who you are is supposed to be the easiest question in the world answer, right? — Jennifer Brown

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

Modern Christians should not mistake our post-Victorian sense of propriety for moral purity. — Gene Edward Veith Jr.

As a novelist, Scott's influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately likened to Shakespeare's; the use of historical settings became a mainstay of Victorian and later fiction; his short stories helped initiate that form; his antiquarian researches and collections were a major contribution to the culture of Scotland. — Ronald Carter

The only permissible judgment in polite society is that no judgment is permissible. A century-long reaction against Victorian prudery, repression, and hypocrisy, led by intellectuals who mistook their personal problems for those of society as a whole, has created this confusion. It is as though these intellectuals were constantly on the run from their stern, unbending, and joyless forefathers - and as if they took as an unfailing guide to wise conduct either the opposite of what their forefathers said and did, or what would have caused them most offence, had they been able even to conceive of the possibility of such conduct. — Theodore Dalrymple

I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society".
"If society were really decent, he would have been — George Gissing

Nothing defined the latter half of England's Victorian age more than the way in which Darwin's claims shook the collective faith of Victorian society. The cataclysmic effect of Darwin's ideas on his society is described by historians as a crisis of faith that turned the once-hopeful period into an "age of anxiety" and an "age of doubt." The years surrounding the publication of Darwin's work are the narrow gate through which the age of belief passed into the age of unbelief, not only for England but for the entire Western world within the shockingly brief period of one generation. — Karen Swallow Prior

O' thinkest thou we shall ever meet again? I doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve For sweet discourses in our times to come. — William Shakespeare

In other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention. — Catharine Arnold