George Edward Woodberry

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

“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.”

“The sign of the poet, then, is that by passion he enters into life more than other men. That is the gift-the power to live....[Poets] have been singularly creatures of passion. They lived before they sang. Emotion is the condition of their existence; passion is the element of their being; and, moreover, the intensifying power of such a state of passion is also must be remembered, for emotion of itself naturally heightens all the faculties, and genius burns the brighter in its own flames.”