Biographers From England

"England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons."

"I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg."

"Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember."

"The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom."

"The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out."

"Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it."

"How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever."

"Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations."

"Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace."

"Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place."

"Although Stephen was apt to be too apologetic for intruding his opinions upon readers who were anxious to hear them, it is proper that every man should apologise for writing about Shakespeare. ... But it would have been a great loss to all lovers of good literature if Stephen had not, at the close of his life, overcome his diffidence and given us his forty-four pages on 'Shakespeare as a Man.'"

"We can no longer be content with refuting our opponents; we are also bound to explain them. The vitality of any doctrine supposed to be erroneous proves that it cannot be entirely erroneous."

"The poet should touch our heart by showing his own"

"The fool who does not know his own folly may be doing nothing, and the philosopher who is trying to darken knowledge may be doing worse than nothing; but every sincere attempt to grapple with real difficulties made by a man not utterly incompetent has its value."

"He called individuals the tissue of society and stated that they are only relatively independent of the social body. Morality is distorted by and does not consider, first of all, the interests of the individual. Stephen claimed that pleasure must be accounted for by the conditions which make acts pleasant in specific cases. Survival in the evolutionary process, Stephen wrote, is more ultimate than pleasure, though men do not consciously realize this fact."

"As Leslie Stephen has demonstrated, to suppress one truth is to suppress all truth, for truth is a coherent whole."

"Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?"

"Philistine – a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species."

"Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens."

"A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance."

"He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view."

"If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries."

"The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact."

"The doctrine of toleration requires a positive as well as a negative statement. It is not only wrong to burn a man on account of his creed, but it is right to encourage the open avowal and defence of every opinion sincerely maintained. Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions."

"Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season."

"If you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable now-a-days, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study."

"Science is the systematic classification of experience."

"Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed."

"Shakespeare is a good raft whereon to float securely down the stream of time; fasten yourself to that and your immortality is safe."

"We must never assume that which is incapable of proof."

"The greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art, even although he may lack the qualities necessary for the adequate execution of some minor details. It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we measure a great man. The strength of a beam is measured by its weakest part, of a man by his strongest.."

"Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families."

"The only cure for grief is action."

"The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature. I know they cannot be divorced — that without intelligence we should be Brutes — but it is the tendency of our gaping, wondering dispositions to give pre-eminence to those faculties which most astonish us. Strength of character seldom, if ever, astonishes; goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice, are worth all the talents in the world."

"A man may be buoyed up by the efflation of his wild desires to brave any imaginable peril; but he cannot calmly see one he loves braving the same peril; simply because he cannot feel within turn that which prompts another. He sees the danger, and feels not the power that is to overcome it."

"Instead, therefore, of saying that Man is the creature of Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance. It is Character which builds an existence out of Circumstance. Our strength is measured by our plastic power. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels, one warehouses, another villas."

"To some men popularity is always suspicious. Enjoying none themselves, they are prone to suspect the validity of those attainments which command it."

"In the development of the great series of animal organisms, the Nervous System assumes more and more of an imperial character. The rank held by any animal is determined by this character, and not at all by its bulk, its strength, or even its utility. In like manner, in the development of the social organism, as the life of nations becomes more complex, Thought assumes a more imperial character; and Literature, in its widest sense, becomes a delicate index of social evolution. Barbarous societies show only the germs of literary life. But advancing civilisation, bringing with it increased conquest over material agencies, disengages the mind from the pressure of immediate wants, and the loosened energy finds in leisure both the demand and the means of a new activity: the demand, because long unoccupied hours have to be rescued from the weariness of inaction; the means, because this call upon the energies nourishes a greater ambition and furnishes a wider arena."

"Remember that every drop that falls, bears into the bosom of the earth a quality of beautiful fertility."

"No deeply-rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse argument. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic."

"Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate."

"The great desire of this age is for a Doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that Conduct may really be the consequence of Belief."

"Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature."

"The art of a great writer is seen in the perfect fitness of his expressions. He knows how to blend vividness with vagueness, knows where images are needed, and where by their vivacity they would be obstacles to the rapid appreciation of his thought."

"The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large"."

"No man really thinks and feels monotonously. If he is monotonous in his manner of setting forth his thoughts and feelings, that is either because he has not learned the art of writing, or because he is more or less consciously imitating the manner of others. The subtle play of thought will give movement and life to his style if he do not clog it with critical superstitions. I do not say that it will give him grace and power; I do not say that relying on perfect sincerity will make him a fine writer, because sincerity will not give talent; but I say that sincerity will give him all the power that is possible to him, and will secure him the inestimable excellence of Variety."

"The first obligation of Simplicity is that of using the simplest means to secure the fullest effect. But although the mind instinctlvely rejects all needless complexity, we shall greatly err if we fail to recognise the fact, that what the mind recoils from is not the complexity, but the needlessness."

"The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence."

"There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification. An example may be seen in the passage which has been a favourite illustration from the days of Longinus to our own. "God said: Let there be light! and there was light." This is a conception of power so calm and simple that it needs only to be presented in the fewest and the plainest words, and would be confused or weakened by any suggestion of accessories."

"Obedient to the primary impulse of adequate expression, the style of a complex subject should be complex; of a technical subject, technical; of an abstract subject, abstract; of a familiar subject, familiar; of a pictorial subject, picturesque."