Quotes from Edmund Gosse

The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiousity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than anyone else.

am inclined to believe it to have been the most salutary, the most practical piece of training which my Father ever gave me. It forced me to observe sharply and clearly, to form visual impressions, to retain them in the brain, and to clothe them in punctilious and accurate language.

She was never a tower of strength to me, but at least she was always a lodge in my garden of cucumbers.

To travel in a foreign country is but to touch its surface. Under the guidance of a novelist of genius we penetrate to the secrets of a nation, and talk the very language of its citizens.

I was much affected by the internal troubles of the Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally violent, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding might have been prevented.

It was like giving a glass of brandy neat to someone who had never been weaned from a milk diet.

Mr. Hunt was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using when we painted butterflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro.

He had recognized, with reluctance, that holiness was not hereditary, but he continued to hope that it might be compulsive.

I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring academy, but " what were all such toys to me?

He was surrounded by peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no purchase.

Claudite jam rivos, pueri: Sat prata biberunt.

He would calculate, by reference to prophecies in the Old and New Testament, the exact date of this event; the date would pass, without the expected Advent, and he would be more than disappointed,—he would be incensed. Then he would understand that he must have made some slight error in calculation, and the pleasures of anticipation would recommence.

what a charming companion, what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.

It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse.

You were thus sailing down the rapid tide of time towards Eternity, without a single authoritative guide (having cast your chart overboard), except what you might fashion and forge on your own anvil,—except what you might guess, in fact.

Either he must cease to think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized.

Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of 'Genesis' checked it at the outset.

The past is a funeral gone by.