“Any heart which could really toughen its affections and sympathies against those dear little people must be wanting in so many humanising experiences of innocence and tenderness.”

Arguing that tenderness towards children is central to humane feeling · Speech, Hospital for Sick Children, London, 9 February 1858

• Childhood
• Love

“It is one of my rules in life not to believe a man who may happen to tell me that he feels no interest in children.”

Linking concern for children with basic human sympathy · Speech, Hospital for Sick Children, London, 9 February 1858

• Childhood
• Compassion

“I believe no true man, with anything to tell, need have the least misgiving, either for himself or his message, before a large number of hearers.”

Encouraging writers and speakers to trust a sincere message plainly expressed · Speech, Birmingham, 6 January 1853

• Art
• Truth

“But let a good book in these “bad” times be made accessible, even upon an abstruse and difficult subject, and my life on it, it shall be extensively bought, read, and well considered.”

Expressing confidence in the public appetite for serious books when they are accessible · Speech, Birmingham, 6 January 1853

• Art
• Hope

“My creed in the exercise of that profession is, that literature cannot be too faithful to the people in return.”

Defining literature as owing loyalty and service to its readers · Speech, Birmingham, 6 January 1853

• Art
• Truth

“From all such evils the people have set literature free.”

Crediting ordinary readers with freeing writers from dependence on wealthy patrons · Speech, Birmingham, 6 January 1853

• Art
• Freedom

“What the working people have found me towards them in my books, I am throughout my life.”

Affirming that his sympathy for working people was personal as well as literary · Speech, Birmingham, 6 January 1853

• Art
• Truth

“No European sky without, and no cheerful home or well-warmed room within shall ever shut out this land from my vision.”

A vivid promise to preserve the memory of America after his return home · Speech, New York, 18 February 1842

• Friendship
• Memory

“I feel as if I stood amongst old friends, whom I had intimately known and highly valued.”

Expressing the intimacy Dickens felt with readers who had shared his imagined world · Speech, Edinburgh, 25 June 1841

• Art
• Friendship

“If I felt your warm and generous welcome less, I should be better able to thank you.”

A graceful admission that deep gratitude can make eloquence difficult · Speech, Edinburgh, 25 June 1841

• Friendship
• Joy

“For to what end is our experience of life if deprived of a fitting esthetic revelation in our faces?”

Imagining the ageing face as a meaningful record of lived experience · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919

• Beauty
• Memory
• Time

“Different systems of beauty culture have compromised our inherent right not only to be ourselves but to look like ourselves.”

Defending individuality against standardised ideals of appearance · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919

• Beauty
• Truth

“Day by day the new interests and activities of modern life are prolonging the youth of our souls.”

Suggesting that intellectual vitality can preserve a sense of inward youth · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919

• Beauty
• Hope
• Time

“The adolescent has facial contours in harmony with the condition of his soul.”

Expressing Loy's belief that the face should visibly correspond to inner life · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919

• Beauty
• Truth

“The face is our most potent symbol of personality.”

Connecting physical appearance with the outward expression of identity · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919

• Beauty
• Truth

“Poetic rhythm, of which we have all spoken so much, is the chart of a temperament.”

Linking poetic rhythm directly to the character of the individual imagination · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“The structure of all poetry is the movement that an active individuality makes in expressing itself.”

Defining poetic form as the trace of an individual mind in motion · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925

• Art
• Poetry

“All reading is the evocation of speech; the difference in our approach, then, in reading a poem or a newspaper is that our attitude in reading a poem must be rather that of listening to and looking at a pictured song.”

Describing poetry as simultaneously visual, verbal and musical · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“More than to read poetry we must listen to poetry.”

Emphasising the essential role of sound in experiencing verse · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925

• Music
• Poetry

“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”

Loy's celebrated definition joins language, image, music and thought · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“There is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it—”

Rejecting inherited moral shame surrounding sexuality · Feminist Manifesto, 1914

• Love
• Truth

“Woman must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved—”

A characteristically severe demand for independence from external validation · Feminist Manifesto, 1914

• Love
• Truth

“The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman depends entirely on chance.”

Contrasting the social standards by which men and women were valued in her era · Feminist Manifesto, 1914

• Truth

“To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first & greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your virtue.”

Attacking the social construction of female virtue as a means of control · Feminist Manifesto, 1914

• Truth