Edward Carpenter Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Edward Carpenter
Probably the respect or stigma attaching to particular classes of actions arose from the fact that these classes of actions were—or were thought to be—beneficial or injurious to the society of the time; but it is also clear that this good or bad name once created clings to the action long after the action has ceased in the course of social progress to be beneficial in the one case, or injurious in the other; and indeed long after the thinkers of the race have discovered the discrepancy. And so in a short time arises a great confusion in the popular mind between what is really good or evil for the race and what is reputed to be so—the bolder spirits who try to separate the two having to atone for this confusion by their own martyrdom.

Edward Carpenter
The law is in a sense the consolidated public opinion of society.

Edward Carpenter
I can see only one ultimate way out of the morass in which we are engulfed. The present commercial system will have to go, and there will have to be a return to the much simpler systems of co-operation be-longing to a bygone age... To that condition, or something very like it, I am convinced we shall have to return if society is to survive. I say this after a long and close observation of life in many phases... This is what the miners, I think, in a dim, subconscious way, have already perceived, for they retain in their minds much of the primitive mentality of pre-civilization days.

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

Edward Carpenter
Every human being grows up inside a sheath of custom, which enfolds it as the swathing clothes enfold the infant.

Edward Carpenter
The money-grubber has been floating with the great current of society, while the poor man has been swimming against it.

Edward Carpenter
Thus we see that though there are for instance in the England of today a variety of classes, and a variety of corresponding codes of public opinion and morality, one of these codes, namely that of the ruling class whose watchword is property, is strongly in the ascendant. And we may fairly suppose that in any nation from the time when it first becomes divided into well-marked classes this is or has been the case. In one age—the commercial age—the code of the commercial or money-loving class is dominant; in another—the military—the code of the warrior class is dominant; in another—the religious—the code of the priestly class; and so on.

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

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

Edward Carpenter
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.

Edward Carpenter
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 Carpenter
Nothing is more certain than that worlds on worlds, and spheres on spheres, stretch behind and beyond the actually seen.

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

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

Edward Carpenter
Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies

Edward Carpenter
The poacher … is asserting a right (and an instinct) belonging to a past time—when for hunting purposes all land was held in common. … In those times private property was theft. Obviously the man who attempted to retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced off a portion of the common ground and—like the modern landlord—would allow no one to till it who did not pay him a tax—was a criminal of the deepest dye. Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way to the front, and have become the respectables of modern society.

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

Edward Carpenter
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!

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

Edward Carpenter
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.

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

Edward Carpenter