George Saintsbury quotes
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“The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.44, tredition
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“I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.”
-- George Saintsbury -
“So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury, Foreword By Mohit K. Ray (2004). “History Of English Criticism”, p.350, Atlantic Publishers & Dist
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“When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1950). “A Last Vintage: Essays and Papers”
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“But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1922). “A Scrap Book”
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“Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1924). “A Last Scrap Book”
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“The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury, Oliver Elton, Adam Blyth Webster (1945). “George Saintsbury: The Memorial Volume : a New Collection of His Essays and Papers”
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“Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1950). “A Last Vintage: Essays and Papers”
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“We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.”
-- George SaintsburySource : "A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day" by George Saintsbury, the first US edition; New York: Dodd, Meads, (Vol. 1, pp. 4-5), (1900-04).
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“Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1934). “A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe from the earliest texts to the present day”
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“Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury, Foreword By Mohit K. Ray (2004). “History Of English Criticism”, p.535, Atlantic Publishers & Dist
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“The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.11, tredition
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“But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.27, tredition
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“Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1963). “Notes on a cellar-book”
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“It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1963). “Notes on a cellar-book”
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“When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book)”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2008). “Notes on a Cellar-Book”, p.30, Univ of California Press
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“One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.11, tredition
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“But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.162, tredition
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“But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1913). “The English Novel”
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“Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.234, tredition
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“To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.13, tredition
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“The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.209, tredition
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“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.”
-- George SaintsburySource : George Saintsbury (1950). “A Last Vintage: Essays and Papers”
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