“But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think o...”

“The clouds had gathered, within the last half-hour. The light was dull; the distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still and colourless met us without a smile.”

“I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of youwhich is a great comfortare, in this respect, much the same as I am.”

“You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tri...”

“If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business.”

“He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.”

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”

“To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down up...”

“Always listen to your heart and listen to your gut. Neither of them will ever lie to you.”

“The soul, they say, is divine and the flesh is iniquity. But I am a musician and I ask this - without the wood and the strings of the violin, where would the sonata find form?”

“ I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.”

“Everyone wanted me to be the bad boy, the label wanted it, the publicists wanted it, but I was just trying to be myself.”