Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Victorians. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Victorians Quotes And Sayings by 97 Authors including Diana Gabaldon,Susan Sontag,Mason Cooley,Anna Godbersen,Manolo Blahnik for you to enjoy and share.
English dragoons
Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.
They were a society whose chief vocations were to entertain and be entertained ...
It was a different social structure. I'd go to [David] Bailey's for dinner at 10:30. There were always girls there and a house full of ... I don't know, anybody. Cecil Beaton, Diana Cooper ... And there I am sitting down with these creatures of the 20th century, and it was normal to us.
I love the British.
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.
In racy Victorian novels, beware of young widows.
traditional British tea.
Stained raincoats, I reckon." "And shitpaper stuck to their shoes.
wankers snorting
They were ... well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.
People with imagination
Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.
Give me the Black Death over a Victorian prude any day. At least the dying screw like it's their last day on earth.
The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
Every one made such a fuss over things nowadays! They wanted injections before they had teeth pulled -they took drugs if they couldn't sleep-they wanted easy chairs and cushions and the girls allowed their figures to slop about anyhow and lay about half naked on the beaches in summer.
The Britons (say historians) were naked, civilized men, learned, studious, abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after ages.
their heads cut off and nailed to posts. Jack Gladstone is
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Long ago life was clean, sex was bad and obscene, and the rich were so mean. Stately homes for the Lords, croquet lawns, village greens, Victoria was my queen.
The men of England,- the men, I mean, of light and leading in England.
I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.
The flannelled fools at the wicket or the mudied oafs at the goals ...
The English take their pleasures sadly, after the fashion of their country.
It doesn't matter if dragons are flying overhead or whatever - a lot of Victoriana is still cut in the frame of fantasy.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.
Their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we'd had was winter, all we'd had was rations. Just very good at keeping quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age.
The Victorian world is extremely dark and extremely bright.
My forebears were fantastically wealthy Armenians who came to England from India in the 19th century and did what foreign types do - they married into a penniless but well-bred local family.
They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.
It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism.
Scientists - the crowd that for dash and style make the general public look like the Bloomsbury set.
Remember the people in the back streets of Derby.
Soul-sucking vampires who were profiting from the increased sense of helplessness in society.
The late Victorian Era brought in part-time education. Not everybody went to school, but they were supposed to have a decent level of schooling; they went part-time after 12.
Every society in every period does or doesn't talk about certain topics. We don't discuss money much; it's almost certain that most people don't know how much their colleagues earn. The Victorians, in contrast, were very happy to discuss money. They weren't, however, happy to discuss sex.
They were a delicious bunch but always forgetting the sensible things like food and daylight and remembering only the more intoxicating ones like love and gin.
people, the kind of man who
The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.
Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.
[The] BBC was known as Auntie suggesting someone prudish and Victorian and that she still is on some days. On others she's a champagne-soaked floozie, her skirts in disarray, her mind in the gutter, and the mixture can be quite wonderful.
men and women who'd constantly filed through our common room, wearing hoodies and piercings - uniform in their aversion to uniformity - to
Once upon a time the English knew who they were.
All the bogeymen together, sitting down to tea.
The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.
If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
I was brought up very conservatively. My father was positively Victorian - I wasn't even allowed to wear my hair down.
They would be shocked if they could see the other women in London: automechanics with grease in their hair, fisherwomen in from te coast with tatooed arms.
Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.
Bah! Suffragettes. I've no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!
I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century - wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars.
Many in America, as one social historian wrote, 'believed implicitly that New York's social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daughters without exception to shady French counts, and arrayed their poodle dogs in diamond tiaras.' ...
Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.
I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best-known books, the 'Mortal Engines' series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.
The generation that bought the most shoes and crippled the moral footing
These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men.
Victorian Self-Improvement Affirmations
"I shall venture to do something different after my postprandialconstitutional.
Today, I shall suffer fools gladly.
were fewer of them in the UK than
Americans were all farmers and shopkeepers at heart ...
Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation,
The countryside they
I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am.
Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.
The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship.
Slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle
Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.
In your walks about London you will sometimes see bent, haggard figures that look as if they had recently been caught in some powerful machinery. They are those fellows who got mixed up with Catsmeat when he was meaning well.
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
The gay motes that people the sunbeams.
The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her beauty.
The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.
Men - ' said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says 'Bolsheviks' - as an earnest Communist says 'Capitalists!' - as a good housewife says 'Blackbeetles' - so did Miss Williams say 'Men!
... they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were.
a bunch of depressed, overeducated shut-ins, but they seemed human to her.
In times like these, who had either the leisure or the inclination to indulge in a touch of elegance?
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.
Some of the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived.
The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!
Where are the rough brave Britons to be found With Hearts of Oak, so much of old renowned?
Americans assume all British people have at least one servant.
Gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.
England is a nation of shopkeepers.
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
Men. They were fucking men. Hard-core, badass, live by their own set of rules ... men.
Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.
The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
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.
They were people who believed that mediocrity was safe.
They (Medievalists) are soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed.
Men of England! who inheritRights that cost your sires their blood.
I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.
Parents sat gloomy and still, like rows of turnips in a grocer's box. Their little criminals sat with them, tapping LOLs on their phones, or milled in the yard outside stinking of Lynx and taut nonchalance. Solicitors strode in and out in a twist of slacks and briefcases.
It was the kind ... of Southern women ... who believe ... that it is impossible to arrive in a new place without a pair of shoes to match every possible change of clothes.
It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas
famously, Scots are very interested in their past, real or invented, but who else is?
I lived the life of Londoners - and thence comes my immense gratitude and my deep attachment with the British people. I do not think there has ever been a people in the world who displayed a heroism as discreet, as mundane and as universal.