Quotes from Harold Bloom

But Hamlet is death's ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious.

Don't be looking for trifles, Señor Don Quixote, or expect things to be impossibly perfect. Are not a thousand comedies performed almost every day that are full of inaccuracies and absurdities, yet they run their course and are received not only with applause but with admiration and all the rest?

Ao contrário do que dizem certos parisienses, o texto está aí não para dar prazer, mas o elevado desprazer ou prazer mais difícil que um texto menor não dará.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.

American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ's love for each of them.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.

Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Our educational institutions are thronged these days by idealistic resenters who denounce competition in literature as in life, but the aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to all the ancient Greeks, and to Burckhardt and Nietzsche, who recovered this truth.

No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation.

Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.

BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron. INTERVIEWER: It's always interminable? BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers.

Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.

only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen.

The pre-Socratic aphorism—ethos is the daemon—can be translated as "character is fate." In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as "personality is our destiny." In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.

I think that the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness, which is the basis of the aesthetic experience once called the Sublime: the quest for a transcendence of limits.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics [.]