44 Quotes by George E. Woodberry

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.

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

What holy cities are to nomadic tribes – a symbol of race and a bond of union – great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.

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.

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.

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

The sweetest roamer is a boy’s young heart.

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.

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.