Harold Bloom quotes - page 2

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic. (Harold Bloom)
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. View quote
Harold Bloom
The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective. View quote
Harold Bloom
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. View quote
Harold Bloom
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails. View quote
Harold Bloom
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era. View quote
Harold Bloom
If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people. View quote
Harold Bloom
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. View quote
Harold Bloom
Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation. View quote
Harold Bloom
The outward limit of human achievement. View quote
Harold Bloom
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene. (Harold Bloom)
Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies. View quote
Harold Bloom
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. View quote
Harold Bloom
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. View quote
Harold Bloom
If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit. View quote
Harold Bloom