Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Trollope

Confidence here isn’t pep talk; it’s social strategy. Trollope’s line cuts against the Victorian instinct to perform humility and accept one’s station. “Never think that you’re not good enough” reads like self-help, but the follow-up tightens into something colder and more observant: “People will take you very much at your own reckoning.” In other words, your self-estimate becomes a public price tag. The world, lazy and status-hungry, will outsource judgment to the way you carry yourself.

Trollope knew this machinery intimately. He wrote about institutions - the Post Office, the church, Parliament, marriage markets - where rank is enforced as much by tone and posture as by law. His novels are full of characters undone not by lack of talent but by deference: people who telegraph uncertainty, then act surprised when they’re handled accordingly. The advice is pointedly gendered (“A man should never think that”), reflecting the era’s idea that masculine competence must be asserted, while women were penalized for the same self-possession. That tension is part of the quote’s bite: it’s counsel for navigating a rigged room, not fixing it.

The subtext is transactional and slightly cynical: self-doubt is not an internal moral struggle, it’s an external liability. Trollope isn’t claiming everyone will love you if you believe in yourself; he’s warning that you’ll be treated like the person you seem prepared to be. In a society obsessed with “proper” place, your own reckoning becomes the first and most persuasive reference letter.