What is the good of life if its chief element, and that which must always be its chief element, is odious? No, the only true economy is to arrange so that your daily labor shall be itself a joy.
Edward CarpenterMaking a choice is like backing a horse - in a hundred years, they may decide you picked wrongly.
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 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