George Edward Woodberry Quotes

If the aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored races of the Earth, I for one should only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of mankind.

The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.

One can re-create what was in the mind of a mathematician a thousand years ago, recapture the truth of the intellect wherever it may have once come to light; but the image of art, that infinite variable of perception and expression in the individual, - that is not easily re-created, at least, not with certainty and in its original fulness.

Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.

Art is expression; what is expressed is often the vision of a subtle and powerful soul, and also his experience with his vision; and however vivid and skilful he may be in the means of expression, yet it is frequently found that the master-spell in his work is something felt to be indefinable and inexpressible.

The sense that someone else cares always helps because it is the sense of love.

From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged.

To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.

The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.

The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

What faith in man must in our new world beat, Thinking how once he saw before his face The west and all the host of stars retreat Into the silent infinite of space!

We foresee no limit to scientific advancement in the future, and in scientific truth there is nothing dead; science is always a living and growing body of knowledge; but art on the contrary has many times run its course to an end, and exhausted its vital power.

Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

Aesthetic freedom is like free speech; it is, indeed, a form of free speech.

A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes.

Always begin anew with the day, just as nature does. It is one of the sensible things that nature does.

Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.

The sweetest roamer is a boy's young heart.

Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

'Old times' never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

I am quite sure that no friendship yields its true pleasure and nobility of nature without frequent communication, sympathy and service.

It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world.

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.

Much of a poet's experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire.

If you can't have faith in what is held up to you for faith, you must find things to believe in yourself, for a life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live.

You must find the ideas that have some promise in them ... It is not enough to just have ideas.