Lytton Strachey

“If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.”

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

“Discretion is not the better part of biography.”

“Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.”

“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.”

“Perhaps the best test of a man's intelligence is his capacity for choosing his own substitutions.”

“It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how dense and how widespread is the evil.”

“The first duty of a great artist is to be inhuman.”

“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.”

“So far as I can see, the only virtue of the past is that it is the past.”

“It is as vain to seek for the beginnings of a great book as it is to seek for the beginnings of a great river.”