Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope turns romance into a balance sheet, and the chill is the point. Calling love a "luxury" drags it out of the realm of fate and soulmates and drops it into the Victorian marketplace, where desire competes with rent, inheritance, and reputation. The second sentence tightens the screw: "no right to it" frames love not as a human need but as a gated commodity, policed by class and cash. It is moral language doing economic work.

The subtext is less anti-love than anti-fantasy. Trollope wrote in a culture where marriage was often a financial merger and where a "good match" could rescue (or ruin) an entire family line. In that world, love is permitted, even celebrated, but only after the ledger clears. His phrasing exposes how respectability masquerades as principle: society doesn’t forbid love; it simply prices it out of reach, then blames the poor for wanting it.

What makes the line sting is its borrowed logic of rights. Rights are supposed to protect you from the market; Trollope flips that, suggesting the market decides what you deserve. The cynicism lands because it’s plausible, not because it’s cruel for cruelty’s sake. He’s pointing at a social order that sentimentalizes romance while quietly enforcing a tariff on it: time, stability, education, leisure, dowry, connections. Read now, it doubles as a critique of modern precarity. When housing, healthcare, and work swallow the future, even intimacy starts to feel like something you have to "afford" - and the most damning part is how quickly we accept the premise.