Lytton Strachey quotes - page 2

Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic, renowned for his contributions to the Bloomsbury Group and the development of modern biography. His book "Eminent Victorians" transformed the way biographies were written, introducing wit and psychological insight. He became a leading figure in early 20th-century literary circles with his innovative style. Here are 34 of his quotes:

Englishmen have always loved Moliere.

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

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

Lytton Strachey

One observed a number of discordant features – a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement and then some lack of human substance, some hereditary thinness in the blood that at times gave people who met him an odd feeling in the spine. He seemed almost indecently lacking in ordinariness.

Lytton Strachey

Madame, I am the civilization they are fighting for.

Lytton Strachey

Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out. That seems to be your method. Also, choose them, in the first place, because you dislike them.

Lytton Strachey

His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering.

Lytton Strachey

To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was an agreeable intellectual pastime, which flattered his sense of superiority both to his subject and to the illusion-ridden mob.

Lytton Strachey