George Edward Woodberry Quotes

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Murphy's First Corollary If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.
"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 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.
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.
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.
Aesthetic freedom is like free speech; it is, indeed, a form of free speech.
Always, some great culture is dying to enrich the soil of new harvests, some civlization is crumbling to rubbish to be the hill of a more beautiful city, some race is spending itself that a lower and more barbarous world may inherit its stored treasure house.
Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.
Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.
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.
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.
Genius is that in which the soul of a race bums at its brightest, revealing and preserving its vision; works of art are great and significant in proportion to the clarity and fulness with which they incarnate this vision.
I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.
I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.
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.
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.
It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.
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.
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AuthorName
George Edward Woodberry
Profession
Critic
BirthDate
12 May, 1855
DeathDate
02 January, 1930
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