George Edward Woodberry Quotes

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

To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.

Always begin anew with the day, just as nature does. It is one of the sensible things that nature does.

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

"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.

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

The willingness to take risks is our grasp of faith.

Education has really only one basic factor: one must want it.

To be faithful to your instincts and the impulses that carry you in the direction of the excellence you most desire and value ... surely that is to lead the noble life.

You must find the ideas that have some promise in them... It is not enough to just have ideas.

We foresee no limit to scientific advancement in the future, and in scientific truth there is nothing dead; science is always a living and growing body of knowledge; but art on the contrary has many times run its course to an end, and exhausted its vital power.

The sweetest roamer is a boy's young heart.

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.

I am quite sure that no friendship yields its true pleasure and nobility of nature without frequent communication, sympathy and service.

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.

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

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.

The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.

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.

If the aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored races of the Earth, I for one should only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of mankind.

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

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

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

One can re-create what was in the mind of a mathematician a thousand years ago, recapture the truth of the intellect wherever it may have once come to light; but the image of art, that infinite variable of perception and expression in the individual, - that is not easily re-created, at least, not with certainty and in its original fulness.

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.