Making a choice is like backing a horse - in a hundred years, they may decide you picked wrongly.
Edward CarpenterRemember, the serpent is still living in the Garden of Eden. Only the heterosexual couple was expelled.
Edward CarpenterWhen he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!
Edward CarpenterIT is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall - which was, and is, before all a Law College - and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.
Edward CarpenterI might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.
Edward CarpenterAnyone who realises what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others.
Edward Carpenter