“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.”

“London is on the whole the most possible form of life.”

“In scattering the seed, scattering your 'charity,' your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or antoher, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another, a little more attention and you will be rewarded with the knowledge of the most unexpected discoveries. You will come at last to look upon your work as a science; it will lay hold of all your life, and may fill up your whole life. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form. He who has received them from you will hand them on to another. And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity?”

“One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges.”

“True love is real. Sadly only few will ever have the joy in experiencing it. If you have the opportunity to be able to share your life with the one person that makes you most alive, most comforted, most happy, do not pass up the opportunityfor anything in the world. You may be passing up one of the best experiences of your life. It may be the one you desire, or it may be the one that desires you. Sometimes the best couples comes from the most unlikely of pairs. You may be passing up the opportunity on joining with the other half that will make you whole. Love is a risk, but a risk worth taking.”

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”