(96 quotes found)
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography”
Oscar Wilde
“There is properly no history; only biography”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Biography lends to death a new terror.”
“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written”
Mark Twain
“Reading history is good for all of us," he says, not surprisingly, perhaps, but his rationale is a fresh, somewhat bracing thought: "If you know history, you know that there is no such thing as a self-made man or self-made woman. We are shaped by people we have never met. Yes, reading history will make you a better citizen and more appreciative of the law, and of freedom, and of how the economy works or doesn't work, but it is also an immense pleasure—the way art is, or music is, or poetry is. And it's never stale.”
David C. McCullough
“Biography is the only true history”
Thomas Carlyle
“No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”
“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
Louis L'Amour
“The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.”
Leon Edel
“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
