Time & Perspective Quote by George Edward Moore

Greatness, in Moore's line, is a kind of bad timing - not a marketing problem but a philosophical one. The "always" is doing the heavy lifting, turning what sounds like a romantic myth about misunderstood geniuses into a claim about how culture actually moves. If an artist is truly great, Moore implies, they cannot sit comfortably inside the aesthetic consensus of their moment, because consensus is built from repetition and legibility, while great art rearranges what counts as legible.

"Before his time" flatters the artist as prophet: the work proposes new standards the present lacks the vocabulary to praise. "Behind it" is the sharper twist. It cuts against the progress narrative and suggests that greatness can look like refusal - a deliberate return to older forms, moral seriousness, or craft when the era prizes novelty, speed, or irony. In both cases, the artist's relation to time is oblique: greatness is measured by friction, not fit.

Moore, a philosopher associated with rigorous analysis and distrust of grand metaphysics, isn't offering mysticism about inspiration. He's pointing to a structural mismatch between innovation and immediate judgment. Audiences, critics, even institutions evaluate through the categories they already have; great work pressures those categories until they crack or become obsolete. The subtext is mildly cynical about taste: recognition is often a lagging indicator, and "timely" art is frequently just well-calibrated to current fashions. Moore's line makes a neat, unsettling wager: if the room instantly gets it, it might not be great; if it doesn't, history might - or might simply move on, leaving greatness stranded either way.