Lytton Strachey Quotes

• If this is dying, then I don’t think much of it.

  Lytton Strachey

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• Johnson’s aesthetic judgements are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them – except one: they are never right.

  Lytton Strachey

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• His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been.

  Lytton Strachey

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• Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains.

  Lytton Strachey

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• ‘Before she came,’ said a soldier, ‘there was cuss in’ and swear in’, but after that it was ’oly as a church.’ The most cherished privilege of the fighting man was abandoned for the sake of Miss Nightingale.

  Lytton Strachey

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• The time was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set it right.

  Lytton Strachey

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• A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile.

  Lytton Strachey

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• The old interests of aristocracy – the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war – faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization.

  Lytton Strachey

• With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.

  Lytton Strachey

• When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.

  Lytton Strachey

• When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower.

  Lytton Strachey

• Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work.

  Lytton Strachey

• Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life, completely aristocratic.

  Lytton Strachey

• There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

  Lytton Strachey

• The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion.

  Lytton Strachey

• The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

  Lytton Strachey

• The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction – in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.

  Lytton Strachey

• The amateur is very rare in French literature – as rare as he is common in our own.

  Lytton Strachey

• Modern as the style of Pascal’s writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

  Lytton Strachey

• In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national – it is universal.

  Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey (29)

Birth:	1st March, 1880
Death:	21st January, 1932
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Critic, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

• 1963 - Nicollette Sheridan
• 1971 - Michael Strahan
• 1929 - Marilyn French
• 1943 - Philip Norman Bredesen Jr.
• 1870 - Mary Johnston

Deaths

• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke
• 1959 - Max Baer
• 1999 - Quentin Crisp
• 1969 - Norman Lindsay
• 1945 - Robert Benchley