44 Quotes by George E. Woodberry

My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.

The willingness to take risks is our grasp of faith.

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

I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.

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

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.

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.

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.