Literary Historian

Quotes & Thinkers in Literary Historian

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🇺🇸Ezra Pound

Literature

1885–1972

"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."

"History breaks down in images not into stories."

"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'."

"An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may."

173 quotes

Lev Shestov

Philosophy

Christian existentialism

1866–1938

"What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being. p. 3"

"Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88" by Bruce Weber, The New York Times"

"Miłosz reading his poems in English at UC Berkeley,"

"The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present."

"The visual possibility of seeing the historical person on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity."

"The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."

"Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II by Isaac Disraeli"

18 quotes

🇬🇧Michael Andrew Screech

Religion

1926–2018

3 quotes

🇫🇷Bernard Groethuysen

"Our passions are like convulsion-fits, which, though they make us stronger for the time, leave us the weaker ever after."

"None know how to prize the Saviour, but such as are zealous in pious works for others."

"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others."

"Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates."

"Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be."

"Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation."

"The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools"

"Reading is a wrestling with ideas greater than any we can create for ourselves. It has been said, a little extravagantly, that reading can get the better of most physical sufferings, all indeed save the pangs of hunger."

"In the Old Testament stories, … the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable."

7 quotes