E. B. Osborn

Edward Bolland Osborn (1867–1938) was a British journalist, author and editor. He is perhaps best known as the editor of The Muse in Arms, an anthology of British war poetry published in November 1917.

Quotes

  • The spirit of the work of Hippocrates and his disciples, perhaps the noblest manifestation of the Greek concept of man's duty to man, is expressed in the "Hippocratic Oath" ...
    If Hippocrates had done nothing more in his laborious life-time than formulate this ideal of the good physician's duty to suffering humanity, he would yet be among our greatest benefactors.
  • In an age when the worst of sinners implicitly accepted the teaching of the Church, what we now regard as "honest doubt" was universally looked on as a sort of leprosy of the soul, a monstrous and highly infectious plague. The heretic was a germ-carrier to be ruthlessly routed out; the more virtuous his life, the more conspicuous his zeal for truth-seeking, the greater the danger of his example to the community. So the philosopher, who was not a theological first and last was apt to fall into bad odor with the conservative churchmen such as Peter Damian, who distrusted the study of logic and protested against any attempt to understand the mysteries of the Faith. Anselm, however, who was afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, thought that heresy must be fought by its own weapons, and he sought with much success the "necessary reasons" underlying the tenets of the Church concerning the nature of the Creator and His relations with his creatures.
    • The Middle Ages. Doran's Modern Readers' Bookshelf. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company. 1928. p. 27. 

Literature and Life (1921)

  • ... Where fresh water and salt water mingle, two gulls are busy feeding. They run to and fro, taking little steps with their wings ups, bobbing quaintly and curtsying low. If Phyllis Bedells, who's bright and innocent beauty has something bird-like in it, wants a Gull's Dance, she should come to these shining sands to learn it. There goes a sandpiper on the point all the way, light and elusive—what a mistress of technique! The choregraphy of sea-beaches is as yet unexplored; it is quite beyond the sultry, land-locked imagination of Russian dancers.
  • There is no greater literary sin than the omission of an Index, and, if I had my way, even novels would be provided with charts of this kind to their multifarious contents—how convenient it wold be for readers, as well as reviewers, to have such a handy means of checking the emotions of Miss May Sinclair's quick-change heroines and the involved relationships, business and otherwise, or Mr. Galsworthy's Forsytes, who increase in number and variety with each successive installment of his epic of property!
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