Quotes from Lytton Strachey

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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

The chief news is that I have grown a beard! Its colour is very much admired, and it is generally considered extremely effective, though some ill-bred persons have been observed to laugh. It is a red-brown of the most approved tint, and makes me look like a French decadent poet—or something equally distinguished.

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

Voltaire abolished Christianity by believing in God.

punctual discharge of his irksome duties.

A Simple Story is one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out.

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

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.