Lytton Strachey Quotes

28 quotes in 443 categories

• Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the…
• If this is dying, I don't think much of it.
• Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing.
• The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place…
• It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.
• Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which…
• The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the…
• Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work.
• The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own.
• How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.
• Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her…
• English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic…
• But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great…
• During this earlier period of his activity Voltaire seems to have been trying - half unconsciously, perhaps - to discover and to express the fundamental…
• In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed…
• The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in…
• It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.
• Englishmen have always loved Moliere.
• Discretion is not the better part of biography.
• In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.

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