Harold Bloom Quotes

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J. K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”

“I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.”

“Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.”

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

“We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.”

“We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.”

“Shelley, who in Prometheus Unbound had observed that the wise lack love and those who have love lack wisdom, went to his end in The Triumph of Life asking why good and the means of good were irreconcilable.”

“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.”

“Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation.”

“Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.”

“The outward limit of human achievement.”