To be ignorant of the lives of...

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~

There was never yet an uninter...

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~

There ain't nothing that break...

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

~Will Rogers~

Show me a character whose life...

Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.

~Fawn M. Brodie~

One anecdote of a man is worth...

One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography.

~William Ellery Channing~

No sooner does a great man dep...

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~

Lives of great men all remind ...

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow~

If those gentlemen would let m...

If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... ''Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.''

~Thomas Carlyle~

I am opposed to writing about ...

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

~Ernest Hemingway~

History is the essence of innu...

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

~Thomas Carlyle, On History~

Every great man nowadays has h...

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

~Oscar Wilde~

Biography is the only true his...

Biography is the only true history.

~Thomas Carlyle~

All good biography, as all goo...

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~

A great biography should, like...

A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

~Andre Maurois~