George Edward Woodberry Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“The critic is genius at one remove; he is not unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and having arrived at this, his task is done.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“"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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“Aesthetic freedom is like free speech; it is, indeed, a form of free speech.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“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.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“The world is a multiplicity, a harvest-field, a battle-ground; and thence arises through human contact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of tillage, or agriculture, ways of fighting, or military tactics and strategy, and these are incorporated in individuals as habits of life.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“Who of English speech, bred to the traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in his 'inky cloak' at a glance? Not to know him would argue one's self untaught in the chief glories of his language.”
-- George Edward Woodberry -
“You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.”
-- George Edward Woodberry