George Saintsbury Quotes (14 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

George Saintsbury: 14 quotes0 likes

Famous George Saintsbury Quotes

“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 Saintsbury

Vol. 3, p. 611
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day

“I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog's-ear place of these pages the warning, "Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.””

George Saintsbury

Vol. 3, p. 644
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day

“So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.”

George Saintsbury

Vol. 3, p. 231
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day

“Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.”

George Saintsbury

Vol. 1, p. 203
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day

“[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 Saintsbury

Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) p. 32

“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.”

George Saintsbury

Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172.

George Saintsbury Quotes

“Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.”

George Saintsbury

Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172.

“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 Saintsbury

A Scrap Book (London: Macmillan, 1922) p. 31

“Historians may lie, but History cannot.”

George Saintsbury

Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172.

“The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.”

George Saintsbury

George Saintsbury: The Memorial Volume (London: Methuen, 1946) p. 120.

“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 Saintsbury

A Last Scrap Book (London: Macmillan, 1924) p. 42

“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 Saintsbury

Vol. 1, pp. 4–5
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day

“When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.”

George Saintsbury

Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172

“In the sect – fairly large and yet unusually choice – of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels.”

George Saintsbury

Preface to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (London: George Allen, 1894) p. ix

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