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Harold Clarke Goddard Quotes

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.

Harold Clarke Goddard
Believe, Destiny, Battle
"The Meaning of Shakespeare". Book by Harold Clarke Goddard, 1951.

There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it--and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.

Harold Clarke Goddard
Art, Men, Glasses
Harold Clarke Goddard (1956). “The Meaning of Shakespeare”

Hamlet is to Macbeth somewhat as the Ghost is to the Witches. Revenge, or ambition, in its inception may have a lofty, even a majestic countenance, but when it has "coupled hell" and become crime, it grows increasingly foul and sordid. We love and admire Hamlet so much at the beginning that we tend to forget that he is as hot-blooded as the earlier Macbeth when he kills Polonius and the King, cold-blooded as the later Macbeth or Iago when he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to death.

Harold Clarke Goddard
Kings, Revenge, Ambition

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