“I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the duncoloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?”

“I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?”

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panesThe yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panesLicked its tongue into the corners of the eveningLingered upon the pools that stand in drainsLet fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneysSlipped by the terrace, made a sudden leapAnd seeing that it was a soft October nightCurled once about the house, and fell asleep”

“Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.”

“A yellow fog swirls past the window-paneAs night descends upon the fabled street:A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,And ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.Here though the world explode, these two survive,And it is always eighteen ninety-five.”

“And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty”