Lytton Strachey Quotes

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

— Lytton Strachey

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

— Lytton Strachey

“As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don't they? I felt when I got to the end that I'd lived for years in that set. But oh dearie me I am glad that I'm not in it!”

— Lytton Strachey

“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.”

— Lytton Strachey

“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 is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.”

— Lytton Strachey

“One has a few moments that are tolerable
one breathes,as it were,again;one remembers things,but one hardly hopes.I hope for the New Age-that is all-which will cure all our woes,and give us new ones,and make us happy enough for death ...”

— Lytton Strachey

“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 determination of an indomitable will.”

— Lytton Strachey

“When the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplaces of the moral judgement are better left unmade.”

— Lytton Strachey

“How on earth does she make the English language float and float?”

— Lytton Strachey

“In what resides the most characteristic Virtue of humanity?
In good works?
Possibly.
In the creation of beautiful objects? Perhaps.
But some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment. To all such David Hume must be a great saint in the calendar; for no mortal being was ever more completely divested of the trammels of the personal and the particular, none ever practiced with more consummated success the divine art of impartiality”

— Lytton Strachey

“Voltaire abolished Christianity by believing in God.”

— Lytton Strachey

“Avuncular authority. In an abrupt, an almost peremptory letter, he laid his case,”

— Lytton Strachey

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

— Lytton Strachey

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

— Lytton Strachey

“The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.”

— Lytton Strachey

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

— Lytton Strachey

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.

— Lytton Strachey

“Discretion is not the better part of biography.”

— Lytton Strachey

“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 psychologist.”

— Lytton Strachey

“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 peace and civilization.”

— Lytton Strachey

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 Wars of Religion.

— Lytton Strachey

“During this earlier period of his activity Voltaire seems to have been trying - half unconsciously, perhaps - to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius.”

— Lytton Strachey

“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 social life, completely aristocratic.”

— Lytton Strachey

“When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.”

— Lytton Strachey

Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

— Lytton Strachey

Englishmen have always loved Moliere.

— Lytton Strachey

“Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work.”

— Lytton Strachey

“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 itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.”

— Lytton Strachey

“When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower.”

— Lytton Strachey

“The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own.”

— Lytton Strachey

“In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.”

— Lytton Strachey

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 drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

— Lytton Strachey

“How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.”

— Lytton Strachey

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

— Lytton Strachey

With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.

— Lytton Strachey

“Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing.”

— Lytton Strachey

“It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.”

— Lytton Strachey

Perhaps the best test of a man's intelligence is his capacity for making a summary.

— Lytton Strachey

“There are a great deal of a great many kinds of love.”

— Lytton Strachey