Lytton Strachey quotes - page 2

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question. (Lytton Strachey)
Englishmen have always loved Moliere. View quote
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. View quote
Lytton Strachey
Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing. View quote
Lytton Strachey
One observed a number of discordant features – a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement and then some lack of human substance, some hereditary thinness in the blood that at times gave people who met him an odd feeling in the spine. He seemed almost indecently lacking in ordinariness. View quote
Lytton Strachey
Madame, I am the civilization they are fighting for. View quote
Lytton Strachey
Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out. That seems to be your method. Also, choose them, in the first place, because you dislike them. View quote
Lytton Strachey
His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering. View quote
Lytton Strachey
To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was an agreeable intellectual pastime, which flattered his sense of superiority both to his subject and to the illusion-ridden mob. View quote
Lytton Strachey