Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Biography

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist

Now the Poet cannot die, nor leave his music as of old, but round him ere he scarce be cold begins the scandal and the cry.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) British Poet

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) British Novelist, Essayist, Biographer

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic

Those only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination, and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.
Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren (1905–89) American Poet, Novelist, Literary Critic

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French Philosopher, Political Activist

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist

Great men have often the shortest biographies.—Their real life is in their books or deeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner (1929–2020) American Critic, Scholar

No matter how brilliant you are, if your style is too intense, most people will dismiss you.
Marty Nemko (b.1950) American Career Coach

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic

Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study.—Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.
Horace Mann (1796–1859) American Educator, Politician, Educationalist

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist

My advice is to consult the lives of other men, as one would a looking-glass, and from thence fetch examples for imitation.
Terence (c.195–159 BCE) Roman Comic Dramatist

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist

Anyone who profits from the experience of others probably writes biographies.
Franklin P. Jones

A life that is worth writing at all, is worth writing minutely and truthfully.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) American Poet, Educator, Academic

Most biographies are of little worth.—They are panegyrics, not lives.—The object is, not to let down the hero; and consequently what is most human, most genuine, most characteristic in his history, is excluded.—No department of literature is so false as biography.
William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
George Meredith (1828–1909) British Novelist, Poet, Critic

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist

The poor dear dead have been laid out in vain; tumed into cash, they are laid out again.
Thomas Hood (1799–1845) English Poet, Humorist

There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.
Unknown

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet

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.
Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic

Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood.
Plutarch (c.46–c.120 CE) Greek Biographer, Philosopher

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