Quotes by Lytton Strachey

“It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.”

“A writers promise is like a tigers smile”

“For ignorance is the first requisite of the historianignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.”

“There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.”

“It was not by gentle sweetness and self-abnegation that order was brought out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed ...”

“The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of pea...”

“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”

“Discretion is not the better part of biography.”

“If this is dying I don't think much of it.”

“Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.”

“A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile”

“For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.”

“If this is dying I don't think much of it.”

“... Voltaire ...The great potentate of the eighteenth century has suffered cruelly indeed at the hands of posterity. Everyone, it is true, has heard of him; but who has read him? It is by his name ...”

“To us, with our broader outlook, our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy...”

“[His reply to the chairman's other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: Tell me, Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violat...”

“If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.”

“The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters...”

“It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives.”

“Madame, I am the civilization they are fighting for.”