Biography Quotes

The history of the world is but the biography of great men. (Thomas Carlyle)
When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. View quote
John Updike
In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise. View quote
Anthony Trollope
There is properly no history only biography. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written. View quote
Mark Twain
The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. View quote
William James
Biography should be written by an acute enemy. View quote
Arthur Balfour
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Discretion is not the better part of biography. View quote
Lytton Strachey
The creative person should have no other biography than his works. (B. Traven)
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. View quote
Benjamin Disraeli
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time. View quote
Louis L'Amour
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. View quote
Rachel Carson
Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation - he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing - I have Ted, will have children - but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him. View quote
Sylvia Plath
[L]ife, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. ... [T]he primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
If, after I die, they should want to write my biography, There's nothing simpler. I've just two dates-of my birth, and of my death. In between the one thing and the other all the days are mine. View quote
Fernando Pessoa
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs. View quote
Rebecca West
Biography lends to death a new terror. View quote
Oscar Wilde
I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone. View quote
Don DeLillo
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. (V. S. Naipaul)
What's bad about my biography? My father was a worker, my brothers, too, and I have always honestly served my country. View quote
Hovhannes Bagramyan
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history. View quote
Carter Woodson
Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be. View quote
Philip Guedalla
The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps. View quote
Edmund Clerihew Bentley