The essential quality of an animal is that it seeks its own living, whereas a vegetable has its living brought to it

I was conducted in the evening to a tavern where several of the weavers who advocate the principles of the People's Charter were in the habit of assembling

Ballet-girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved

It is easy enough to be moral after a good dinner beside a snug coal fire, and with our hearts well warmed with fine old port

But the branches of industry are so multifarious, the divisions of labour so minutes and manifold, that it seems at first almost impossible to reduce them to any system

The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.

The costermongers' boys will, I am informed, cheat their employers, but they do not steal from them.

A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated fromm, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind.

The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis

There is a tone of morality throughout the rural districts of England, which is unhappily wanting in the large towns and the centres of particular manufactures

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact

Nothing is too difficult unless you decide to keep shifting it to tomorrow till you can’t do it any longer.

Every man must do two things alone

I like to look put together without trying too hard. I don't want to look as if God's made another rainbow - I prefer muted, autumnal colours, like most fading redheads.

I'm not desperate [but] I know that some day I'll be the coach again of some team.

Don't start me talking, I could talk all night. My mind goes sleepwalking while I'm putting the world right.

I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.

Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

I believe democracy will succeed in Tunisia, but I also believe that it will succeed in the other Arab Spring countries.

We are fossils in the making.

It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.