Edward Carpenter quotes:

Where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds come to listen with serious and sympathetic men.

The general fact of surplus value, namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

We lived within two hundred yards of the sea, and its voice was in our ears night and day.

Early in 1888 one or two of us got together to establish our own Sheffield Socialist Society.

For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, and contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven.

It 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.

My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.

IN April 1882 my father died; and I was at once whirled out of my land of dreams into a very different sphere.

I was in the Square at the time. The crowd was a most good-humoured, easy going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment of mounted police came cantering up.

When 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!

Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped - to reach it.

Making a choice is like backing a horse - in a hundred years, they may decide you picked wrongly.

Motherhood is, after all, woman's great and incomparable work.

The general fact of surplus value, namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious."

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.

Let your mind be quiet, realizing the beauty of the world, and the immense boundless treasures that it holds.

Remember, the serpent is still living in the Garden of Eden. Only the heterosexual couple was expelled.

Whatever the practical value of the Walden experiment may be, there is no question that the book is one of the most vital and pithy ever written.

With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome.

The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau's Walden.

Anyone 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.

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.

I saw deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.