George Edward Woodberry I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry 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. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry Always, some great culture is dying to enrich the soil of new harvests, some civlization is crumbling to rubbish to be the hill of a more beautiful city, some race is spending itself that a lower and more barbarous world may inherit its stored treasure house. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry 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. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry 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. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry 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. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry 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. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry 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. – George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry 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. – George Edward Woodberry
