44 Quotes by George E. Woodberry

Thrashing is not the most noticeably awful of disappointments. Not to have attempted is the genuine disappointment.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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