Daily Inspiration Quote by George Edward Woodberry

Nostalgia is treated here like a polite lie we tell ourselves to avoid looking straight at time. Woodberry, a critic by trade and a late-19th-century moral stylist by temperament, punctures the comforting fantasy of recoverable “old times” with a brisk concession: they do not return. The first clause is almost clinical, then he softens the blow with “I suppose it’s just as well,” a phrase that performs restraint rather than triumph. He’s not scorning memory; he’s keeping it from becoming a worldview.

The pivot is the real artistry: “What comes back” reframes return itself. He doesn’t deny recurrence; he relocates it. Not the past, but the morning. Not a vanished social order, but a daily reset. That’s a critic’s move: shift the reader from sentimental content to formal pattern, from private yearning to a repeatable structure in the world. “Every day in the year” insists on frequency and reliability, a quiet argument against the melodrama of loss.

Subtextually, Woodberry is negotiating modernity’s pressure. Writing in an era obsessed with heritage yet accelerating into industrial and cultural change, he offers a kind of disciplined optimism: accept irreversibility, then claim the modest miracle that actually happens. The closing “and that’s better” is deceptively bold. It implies that the past’s appeal is partly laziness - a desire for a story with known outcomes - while the morning demands participation. The point isn’t that change is good; it’s that aliveness is.