Daily Inspiration Quote by Goldwin Smith

“Art is expression” sounds like a roomy, liberal definition, but Goldwin Smith snaps it shut with the second clause: “to have high expression you must have something high to express.” The intent isn’t to praise creativity in the abstract; it’s to rank it. Smith, a Victorian-era historian and public moralist, treats art less as a free-floating aesthetic game than as a kind of cultural report card. Expression is the vehicle. The cargo is what matters.

The subtext is a warning aimed at both artists and audiences. If a society’s inner life is thin - if its ideals are cheap, its ethics opportunistic, its imagination captive to fashion - then no amount of technical brilliance can reliably produce “high” art. You might get surface dazzle, but not elevation. Smith is making a values-based argument that cuts against the modern tendency to separate craft from content, or to treat sincerity as sufficient. “High” here isn’t just “difficult” or “refined”; it’s moral and civilizational, the kind of height Victorians associated with character, duty, and intellectual seriousness.

Context matters: Smith lived amid industrial capitalism, mass literacy, and expanding popular entertainment, all of which created new cultural abundance and new cultural anxiety. His line registers that anxiety: the fear that more art does not necessarily mean better art, and that democratized taste might flatten standards. It works because it flatters the reader’s desire for depth while quietly demanding self-scrutiny: if you want great art, cultivate a greatness worth expressing.