55 Quotes by 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world.

The great effort of civilization has been, and still is, the attempt to introduce a principle of control into that casual swarm of impressions which makes up men's thought and of which, especially with swayed by emotion, spontaneous action is the law.

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.