Harold Bloom Quotes

66 quotes in 1016 categories

• What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
• All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
• There is no method except yourself.
• Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the…
• Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out…
• Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
• We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily…
• I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
• At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
• Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
• But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to…
• Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you…
• I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
• I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might…
• I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
• I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
• I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or…
• In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating…
• Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
• More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

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