We may either proceed from principles to facts, or recede from facts to principles.
Henry Mayhew

Advice to persons about to marry - don't.
Henry Mayhew

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.
Henry Mayhew

Park women, properly so called, are those degraded creatures, utterly lost to all sense of shame, who wander about the paths most frequented after nightfall in the Parks, and consent to any species of humiliation for the sake of acquiring a few shillings.
Henry Mayhew

A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated fromm, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind.
Henry Mayhew

In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity.
Henry Mayhew

It is easy enough to be moral after a good dinner beside a snug coal fire, and with our hearts well warmed with fine old port.
Henry Mayhew

But the branches of industry are so multifarious, the divisions of labour so minutes and manifold, that it seems at first almost impossible to reduce them to any system.
Henry Mayhew