Quotes from George Saintsbury

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.

Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humor excites in those who lack it.

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humour excites in those who lack it.

The gamin Gavroche puts in a strong plea for mercy, and his sister Eponine, if Hugo had chosen to take more trouble with her, might have been a great, and is actually the most interesting, character. But Cosette—the cosseted Cosette—Hugo did not know our word or he would have seen the danger—is merely a pretty and rather selfish little doll, and her precious lover Marius is almost ineffable.

Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.

Is not 'casual' labour the very secret and safety-valve of a safe and sound labour system generally?...In a complicated and commercial state constant employment at regular wages is impossible; while dole-supported unemployment, at anything like the wages of employment, is demoralizing to begin with and ruinous at its more or less quickly arriving end.

It is not, in the common and cheap misuse of the term, the most "romantic" arrangement, but some not imperfect in lovelore have held that a woman's love is never so strong as when she is past girlhood and well approaching age, and that a man's is never stronger than when he is just not a boy.

As for the insane doctrine that being born in a country gives some right to the possession of the soil of that country, it hardly requires notice.

Even the 'right to live'...extends no further than the right to protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality possibly may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but it is questionable whether strict justice demands it.

People talk of "class selfishness". Well, I know something of history, and I never heard of any tyrant, aristocrat, capitalist, slave-holder, buccaneer, middle-class shopkeeper - so absolutely and exclusively governed by selfishness as Trades Union "labour".

a "proletarian" world, with no variety, no "quality", nothing noble, ancient, memorial in it, but in theory simply a gigantic sty of evenly-fed swine, in practice a den of fratricidal and cannibalic monsters.

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right

The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.