55 Quotes by George Edward Woodberry

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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