Goldwin Smith Quotes & Sayings

“Personality is lower than partiality.”

“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.”

“If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.”

“Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Above all nations is humanity.”

“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.”

“Rome was great in arms, in government, in law.”