Oscar Wilde
Writer
"Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography."
Biographies quotes
Biographies
208 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
"Great geniuses have the shortest biographies."
Carolyn Wells
Author
"I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it."
Charles Darwin
Naturalist, Geologist
"Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton."
Benjamin Disraeli
Politician, Author
"Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside biographies — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Biographies quotes (page 1 of 11)
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"Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed."
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"A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely."
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"A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked."
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"To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves."
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"On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken."
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"Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!"
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"Biography is the only true history."
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"The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies."
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"The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure."
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"I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones."
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"The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever."
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"What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor."
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"The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and ones own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity."
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"I can find my biography in every fable that I read."
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"All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life."
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"But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about."
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"I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel."
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"Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records."
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"Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it."
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"Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading."
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