George Saintsbury Quotes & Sayings

It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times. — George Saintsbury

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first. — George Saintsbury

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth. — George Saintsbury

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story. — George Saintsbury

I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast. — George Saintsbury

As for the insane doctrine that being born in a country gives some right to the possession of the soil of that country, it hardly requires notice. — George Saintsbury

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written. — George Saintsbury

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast. — George Saintsbury

Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes. — George Saintsbury

The Book of History is the Bible of Irony. — George Saintsbury

Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world. — George Saintsbury

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it. — George Saintsbury

...a "proletarian" world, with no variety, no "quality", nothing noble, ancient, memorial in it, but in theory simply a gigantic sty of evenly-fed swine, in practice a den of fratricidal and cannibalic monsters. — George Saintsbury

Even if the purely personal hardships of "labour" in the 'forties were not exaggerated, they have simply disappeared now...instead of starvation-wages for the individual "hand", elaborate calculations are made - not on comic opera stages, but in solemn Committees and even Commissions - how much it will take to keep him, his wife, and their two or three children, housed, fed, clothed, and amused - education and medical attendance being already provided for at the expense of the upper and middle classes...have all these enormous changes in their favour benefited the morale of the working classes?...Are they not lazier, greedier, more full of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness towards other classes, readier to put on those classes any burden of which they may relieve themselves? — George Saintsbury

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist. — George Saintsbury

The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. — George Saintsbury

The hardest thing to attain ... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority. — George Saintsbury

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. — George Saintsbury

To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much. — George Saintsbury

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time. — George Saintsbury

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right. — George Saintsbury

When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book) — George Saintsbury

Even the 'right to live'...extends no further than the right to protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality possibly may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but it is questionable whether strict justice demands it. — George Saintsbury

People talk of "class selfishness". Well, I know something of history, and I never heard of any tyrant, aristocrat, capitalist, slave-holder, buccaneer, middle-class shopkeeper - so absolutely and exclusively governed by selfishness as Trades Union "labour". — George Saintsbury

So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge. — George Saintsbury

The gamin Gavroche puts in a strong plea for mercy, and his sister Eponine, if Hugo had chosen to take more trouble with her, might have been a great, and is actually the most interesting, character. But Cosette - the cosseted Cosette - Hugo did not know our word or he would have seen the danger - is merely a pretty and rather selfish little doll, and her precious lover Marius is almost ineffable. — George Saintsbury

Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy. — George Saintsbury

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare. — George Saintsbury

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire. — George Saintsbury

Is not 'casual' labour the very secret and safety-valve of a safe and sound labour system generally?...In a complicated and commercial state constant employment at regular wages is impossible; while dole-supported unemployment, at anything like the wages of employment, is demoralizing to begin with and ruinous at its more or less quickly arriving end. — George Saintsbury

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. — George Saintsbury

Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage. — George Saintsbury