Goldwin Smith quotes

Above all nations is humanity. (Goldwin Smith)
There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.
Goldwin Smith
Personality is lower than partiality.
Goldwin Smith
Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.
Goldwin Smith
Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express.
Goldwin Smith
No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.
Goldwin Smith
There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.
Goldwin Smith
The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and kingdoms across the border.
Goldwin Smith
Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?
Goldwin Smith
Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.
Goldwin Smith
America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious. (Goldwin Smith)
But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.
Goldwin Smith
Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
Goldwin Smith
The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.
Goldwin Smith
Rome was great in arms, in government, in law.
Goldwin Smith
The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.
Goldwin Smith
Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God.
Goldwin Smith
The Roman legions were formed in the first instance of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength.
Goldwin Smith
The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.
Goldwin Smith
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
Goldwin Smith
It is evident that in the period designated as that of the kings, when Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and country, a great and wealthy city. (Goldwin Smith)
If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.
Goldwin Smith
I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.
Goldwin Smith
The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.
Goldwin Smith
We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself.
Goldwin Smith