Biographies quotes
208 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside biographies — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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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."
"I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel."
"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."
"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."
"Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading."
"I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself."
"There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present."
"The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own."
"That requires quite an imaginative leap because it's hard for me to imagine that my biography would be of much interest to anyone, and because I'm a fairly private person, the notion doesn't appeal to me."
"Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all."
"Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement's origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography."
"The man who walks with Henslow."
"I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)"
"I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background."
"I wanted to make a film that wasn't just a biography. When you watched it, you actually felt that you watched a movie, that you had an emotional reaction. In order to do that, I felt that I had to really keep myself emotionally raw while working on the film. I had to feel myself crying, so the audience could be moved, too."
"All history is biography."
"History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons"
"There is no history; only biography."
"The parallel circumstances and kindred images to which we readily conform our minds are, above all other writings, to be found in the lives of particular persons, and therefore no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography."
"Your biography is not your destiny, your decisions are."
