Biography Quotes

One of the new painful is all payment!

Lord Byron (1788-1824) English Poet

A great American need not fear the hand of his assassin; his real demise begins only when a friend like Mr Sorensen closes the mouth of his tomb with a stoen.

Every great man now has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Angl-Irish author.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of the victim’s cheque books.

Silas W.Mitchell (1820-1914) American physician, author.

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) British author.

A well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish author.

Read no history; nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Biography is a region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.

Biography is the personal and home aspect of history.

Wilmott.

The best teachers of humanity are the lives of great men.

Fowler.

Great man have often the shortest biographies. Their real life is in their books or deeds.

There is properly no history, only biography.

Channing.

The remains of great and good men, like Elijah’s mantle, ought to be gathered up and preserved by their survivors; that as their works follow them in the reward of them, they may stay behind in their benefit.

M.Henry.

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.

Channing.

Rich as we are in biography, a well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons able and willing to furnish the record.

Carlyle.

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.

Plutarch.

A life that is worth writing at all, is worth writing minutely and truth fully.

Longfellow.

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.

H.Mann.

Of all studies, the most delightful and useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true; but lives which I have read, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, the utility of truth.

Landor.

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

Carlyle.

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.

Johnson.

Biography of great, but especially of good men, are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic actions for their own and the world’s good.

S. Smiles