Top 269 Victorian Quotes & Sayings

I love white linens and walls mixed with antique Victorian furniture.

The Victorian Age was very stimulating, historically impressive.

Period films to me are very often alienating to the audience. There's very often a formality. A staunchy quality to them that comes from the misenscene. It also comes from the performances of the actors, because they're acting Victorian which really means that they're just acting the way they've seen previous actors act Victorian.

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.

Redheads get so stereotyped. You're either exotic and wild or totally Victorian.

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.

When I went to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne to study drama, I felt I'd finally found my place in life.

The Greens simply don't understand that a strong economy is the key to a better Victoria for all Victorian families.

I wouldnt mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

You've probably heard about the theory of steam-engine time - that even after the steam engine had been invented, it had to wait until people were ready to make use of it. The same thing happens in literary circles. The truth is, I'm not terribly interested in Victorian times; I'm interested in Victorian writers. I'm interested in most eras of history, but not the Victorian Era especially. I was interested in the John Franklin Expedition. I was interested in these last five weird years of Dickens' life. And I just have to take the age that comes with all that when I write about it.

With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.

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

I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

The Victorian era is the sexiest age for me, but I also like a woman in a pair of jeans.

I was brought up very conservatively. My father was positively Victorian - I wasn't even allowed to wear my hair down.

My humor was Victorian - and still is.

I love Victorian novels, the way they capture the nuances of the human condition.

I suppose British people generally, probably have very stereotypical notions about the Irish that go back to Victorian times.

I'm completely uninterested in the origins of Stonehenge. I don't care about the real story behind it or whether it should be saved or not. What I'm interested in is this: in the Victorian era, you could go there as an early cultural tourist and you were given a chisel to chip off a bit of the stones and take it with you. That's what you did in Victorian times.

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.

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.

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.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.

Verbosity was an established Victorian trait.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

I've admired historical clothes like Victorian gowns since I was a child, and it's what motivated me to go into fashion.

I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don't hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.

Simply put, if you are a Wayward Victorian Girl, I'll find you.

The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.

Certainly, Doctor. Let's talk about your chair. Victorian?

My favourite men's clothes are like Victorian British clothing.

I love the idea of exploring the Victorian imagination and what Victorians thought the world of fantasy would look like.

I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it.

The greatest architectural illusion is not Baroque fancy or Victorian flamboyant, but minimalism.

We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

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

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

We've lived in our Victorian house for 20 years and the kitchen is the centre of family life - we don't just eat here, we live here.

Even in name, he seems like a Victorian oddity. "Igor, fetch 'the Crouch' from the catacombs, we're going to the graveyard".

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

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 main reason why historians have skated over the relationship of Victorian PMs with the press is that they haven't been looking for it. It takes a lecturer in media studies such as Paul Brighton to point out that media management was part of the job of a Victorian prime minister.

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am.

My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic.

All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

In the Victorian age, actors played Romeo until they were 60 or 70 years old.

In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.

If you look at Victorian England, being a soldier was considered a noble profession.

I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter.

I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.

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.

We're creating a TV show of Scrooge, starring Jamie Farr, with Buddy Hackett as Scrooge. We're shooting in this Victorian set for weeks, and Hackett is pissed all the time, angry that he's not the center of attention, and finally we get to the scene where we've gotta shoot him at the window, saying, "Go get my boots," or whatever. The set is stocked with Victorian extras and little children in Oliver kind of outfits, and the director says, "All right, Bud - just give it whatever you want." And Hackett goes off on a rant. Unbelievably obscene.

Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.

I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.