Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic
My advice is to consult the lives of other men, as one would a looking-glass, and from thence fetch examples for imitation.
—Terence (c.195–159 BCE) Roman Comic Dramatist
History can be frmed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967) French Novelist, Biographer
The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of his victim’s check-books.
—Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) American Neurologist, Writer
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
—Robert Penn Warren (1905–89) American Poet, Novelist, Literary Critic
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
—Simone Weil (1909–1943) French Philosopher, Political Activist
One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.
—Unknown
Now the Poet cannot die, nor leave his music as of old, but round him ere he scarce be cold begins the scandal and the cry.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) British Poet
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
—George Steiner (1929–2020) American Critic, Scholar
Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) British Novelist, Essayist, Biographer
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood.
—Plutarch (c.46–c.120 CE) Greek Biographer, Philosopher
Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish Critic, Journalist, Philosopher
Great men have often the shortest biographies.—Their real life is in their books or deeds.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
No matter how brilliant you are, if your style is too intense, most people will dismiss you.
—Marty Nemko (b.1950) American Career Coach
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American Short-Story Writer, Novelist
If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say… “Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
—Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Most biographies are of little worth.—They are panegyrics, not lives.—The object is, not to let down the hero; and consequently what is most human, most genuine, most characteristic in his history, is excluded.—No department of literature is so false as biography.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
There ain’t nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.
—Will Rogers (1879–1935) American Actor, Rancher, Humorist
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