Lytton Strachey > Quotes

“A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile”
― Lytton Strachey

“It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.”
― Giles Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex

“As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don't they? I felt when I got to the end that I'd lived for years in that set. But oh dearie me I am glad that I'm not in it!”
― Giles Lytton Strachey, The Letters of Lytton Strachey

“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.”
― Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

“For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.”
― Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

“One has a few moments that are tolerable--one breathes,as it were,again;one remembers things,but one hardly hopes.I hope for the New Age-that is all-which will cure all our woes,and give us new ones,and make us happy enough for death....”
― Lytton Strachey

“When the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplaces of the moral judgement are better left unmade.”
― Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

“In what resides the most characteristic Virtue of humanity?
In good works?
Possibly.
In the creation of beautiful objects? Perhaps.
But some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment. To all such David Hume must be a great saint in the calendar; for no mortal being was ever more completely divested of the trammels of the personal and the particular, none ever practiced with more consummated success the divine art of impartiality”
― Giles Lytton Strachey

“It was not by gentle sweetness and self-abnegation that order was brought out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will.”
― Lytton Strachey

“If this is dying, I don't think much of it.”
― Lytton Strachey

“The chief news is that I have grown a beard! Its colour is very much admired, and it is generally considered extremely effective, though some ill-bred persons have been observed to laugh. It is a red-brown of the most approved tint, and makes me look like a French decadent poet—or something equally distinguished.”
― Lytton Strachey

“How on earth does she make the English language float and float?”
― Lytton Strachey, The Letters of Lytton Strachey

“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.”
― Lytton Strachey

“The son of a respectable Collector of Customs, he had been educated at Winchester and Oxford, where his industry and piety had given him a conspicuous place among his fellow students. It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas (Arnold) might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History of England?”
― Lytton Stratchey

“Voltaire abolished Christianity by believing in God.”
― Lytton Strachey

“There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.”
― Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature

“Mon dieu! — George Mallory! When that’s been written, what more need be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words — oh heavens! heavens! I found of course that he’d been absurdly maligned — he’s six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face — ah, incredible — the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an unimaginable English boy . . . . For the rest, he’s going to be a schoolmaster, and his intelligence is not remarkable. What’s the need?”
― Lytton Strachey, The Letters of Lytton Strachey

“Clio is one of the most glorious of the Muses; but, as everyone knows, she (like her sister Melpomene) suffers from a sad defect: she is apt to be pompous. With her buskins, her robes, and her airs of importance she is at times, indeed, almost intolerable. But fortunately the Fates have provided a corrective. They have decreed that in her stately advances she should be accompanied by certain apish, impish creatures, who run round her tittering, pulling long noses, threatening to trip the good lady up, and even sometimes whisking to one side the corner of her drapery, and revealing her undergarments in a most indecorous manner. They are the diarists and letter-writers, the gossips and journalists of the past, the Pepyses and Horace Walpoles and Saint-Simons, whose function it is to reveal to us the littleness underlying great events and to remind us that history itself was once real life.”
― Lytton Strachey

“Every one agreed that General Gordon had been avenged at last. Who could doubt it? General Gordon himself, possibly, fluttering, in some remote Nirvana, the pages of a phantasmal Bible, might have ventured on a satirical remark. But General Gordon had always been a contradictious person—even a little off his head, perhaps, though a hero; and besides, he was no longer there to contradict… At any rate, it had all ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.”
― Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

“A Simple Story is one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out.”
― Lytton Strachey, Delphi Collected Works of Lytton Strachey (Illustrated)

“year. That sum was afterwards raised to L400 and finally to L1000; but when my debts made it necessary for me to sacrifice a great part of my income, Madame St. Laurent insisted upon again returning to her income of L400 a year. If Madame St. Laurent is to return to live amongst her friends, it must be in such a state of independence as to command their respect. I shall not require very much, but a certain number of servants and a carriage are essentials." As to his own settlement, the Duke observed that he would expect the Duke of York's marriage to be considered the precedent. "That," he said, "was a marriage for the succession, and L25,000 for income was settled, in addition to all his other income, purely on that account. I shall be contented with the same arrangement, without making any demands grounded on the difference of the value of money in 1792 and at present. As for the payment of my debts," the Duke concluded”
― Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria

“punctual discharge of his irksome duties.”
― Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria