Don't be led away to think this part of the world important and that unimportant. Every corner of the world is important. No man knows whether this part or that is most so, but every man may do some honest work in his own corner.

— Thomas Hughes

Grey hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre or Carthage, the great trading nations

— Thomas Hughes

Old timidity has disappeared, and is replaced by silent, quaint fun, with which his face twinkles all over, as he listens.

— Thomas Hughes

Remember this, I beseech you, all you boys who are getting into the upper forms. Now is the time in all your lives, probably, when you may have more wide influence for good or evil on the society you live in than you ever can have again.

— Thomas Hughes

Schools and universities are (as in a body) the noble and vital parts, which being vigorous and sound send good blood and active spirits into the veins and arteries, which cause health and strength; or, if feeble or ill-affected, corrupt all the vital parts; whereupon grow diseases, and in the end, death itself.

— Thomas Hughes

Shopkeepers —the great landed and commercial interests—regularly sat and slept, and where the two publicans occupied pews, but seldom made even the pretence of worshiping.

— Thomas Hughes

That is the Proctor. He is our Cerberus; he has to keep all undergraduates in good order." "What a task! He ought to have three heads.

— Thomas Hughes

The astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and forever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counselors.

— Thomas Hughes

The faces of your young people in general are not interesting—I don't mean the children, but the young men and women—and they are awkward and clownish in their manners, without the quaintness of the elder generation, who are the funniest old dears in the world." "They will all be quaint enough as they get older. You must remember the sort of life they lead. They get their notions very slowly, and they must have notions in their heads before they can show them on their faces.

— Thomas Hughes

The giving of undue prominence to one fact brings others inexorably on the head of the student to avenge his neglect of them,

— Thomas Hughes