Edmund Gosse > Quotes

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

“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.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

“Two Points of View

If I forget, —
May joy pledge this weak heart to sorrow!
If I forget, —
May my soul's coloured summer borrow
The hueless tones of storm and rain,
Of ruth and terror, shame and pain, —
If I forget!

Though you forget, —
There is no binding code for beauty;
Though you forget, —
Love was your charm, but not your duty;
And life's worst breeze must never bring
A ruffle to your silken wing, —
Though you forget.

If I forget, —
The salt creek may forget the ocean;
If I forget, —
The heart whence flows my heart's bright motion,
May I sink meanlier than the worst,
Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst, —
If I forget!

Though you forget, —
No word of mine shall mar your pleasure;
Though you forget, —
You filled my barren life with treasure,
You may withdraw the gift you gave,
You still are lord, I still am slave, —
Though you forget.”
― Sir Edmund William Gosse, The Works of Edmund Gosse

“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?”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

“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.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

“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.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“Both my parents, I think, were devoid of sympathetic imagination; in my Father, I am sure, it was singularly absent. Hence, although their faith was so strenuous that many persons might have called it fanatical, there was no mysticism about them. They went rather to the opposite extreme, to the cultivation of a rigid and iconoclastic literalness.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“He was surrounded by peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no purchase.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“Either he must cease to think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“The theory of extreme Puritanism can surely offer no quainter example of its fallacy than this idea that the omnipotent Jehovah—could be seriously offended, and could stoop to revenge, because a little, nervous child of nine”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“Claudite jam rivos, pueri: Sat prata biberunt.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“We are the victims of hallowed proverbs, and one of the most classic of these tells us that 'the child is father of the man'. But in my case I cannot think that this was true.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“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.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“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.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“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.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“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.”
― Edmund Gosse

“These had the colourless triteness of a story retold a hundred times. I longed for something new, something that would gratify curiosity and excite surprise.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“If I forget, —
May joy pledge this weak heart to sorrow!
If I forget, —
May my soul's coloured summer borrow
The hueless tones of storm and rain,
Of ruth and terror, shame and pain, —
If I forget!

Though you forget, —
There is no binding code for beauty;
Though you forget, —
Love was your charm, but not your duty;
And life's worst breeze must never bring
A ruffle to your silken wing, —
Though you forget.

If I forget, —
The salt creek may forget the ocean;
If I forget, —
The heart whence flows my heart's bright motion,
May I sink meanlier than the worst,
Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst, —
If I forget!

Though you forget, —
No word of mine shall mar your pleasure;
Though you forget, —
You filled my barren life with treasure,
You may withdraw the gift you gave,
You still are lord, I still am slave, —
Though you forget.”
― Sir Edmund William Gosse, The Works of Edmund Gosse

“She was never a tower of strength to me, but at least she was always a lodge in my garden of cucumbers.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“My stepmother had quietly devoted herself to what she thought the best way of bringing me up, and she did not propose now to be thwarted by the wife of a lunatic Baptist.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“He had recognized, with reluctance, that holiness was not hereditary, but he continued to hope that it might be compulsive.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“but only by one who was fully capable of independent thought, in other words by a more or less adult person, The man or woman claiming the privileges of conversion must be able to understand and to grasp what his religious education was aiming at.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“whether I also would not indulge them 'by repeating some sweet stanzas'. No one more ready than I. Without a moment's hesitation, I stood forth, and in a loud voice I began one of my favourite passages from Blair's 'Grave': If death were nothing, and nought after death—
  If when men died at once they ceased to be,—
  Returning to the barren Womb of Nothing
  Whence first they sprung, then might the debauchee…”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“And he said we must judge not, lest we ourselves bejudged. I had just enough tact to let that pass, but I was quite aware that our whole system was one of judging, and that we had no intention whatever of being judged ourselves.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“I continued to have no companions, or even acquaintances of my own age. I am unable to recollect exchanging two words with another child till after my Mother's death.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“It will be justly said that my life was made up of very trifling things, since I have to confess that this incident of the Browns' invitation was one of its landmarks.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“Father of mercies! Why from silent earth
  Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth?
  Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
  And make a thankless present of thy light?
  Push into being a reverse of thee,
  And animate a clod with misery?”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“So far as the sects agreed with my Father and my Mother, the sects were walking in the light; wherever they differed from them, they had slipped more or less definitely into a penumbra of their own making, a darkness into which neither of my parents would follow them.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“It was like giving a glass of brandy neat to someone who had never been weaned from a milk diet.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments

“As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual drought, gave me no opportunity of outward growth. They did not destroy, but they cooped up, and rendered slow and inefficient, that internal life which continued, as I have said, to live on unseen.”
― Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments