Byron Quotes

• Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Children, Reflection, Poet

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.121, Ravenio Books

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• All human history attests That happiness for man, - the hungry sinner! - Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner. ~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 99

  Lord Byron

  Food, Men, Apples

  George Gordon Byron, “Don Juan: Canto The Thirteenth”

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• From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,-a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Love, Hate, Two

  "Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review". Book by Thomas B. Macaulay, Vol. I, 1843.

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• Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.

  Jonathan Bowden

  Courage, Thug, Years

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• What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason.

  Mark Twain

  Heart, Men, Race

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.9238, Delphi Classics

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• Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Mother, Children, Firsts

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• Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

  W. H. Auden

  Grief, Passion, Men

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• I have to say that it was a very strange experience when, later in life, I represented Byron Scott and was negotiating with West - whose picture I used to have over my bed! That took some getting used to.

  Leigh Steinberg

  Later In Life, Experience, Bed

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• You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

  John Keats

  Differences, Tasks, Speak

  John Keats (1820). “The Complete Works of John Keats”, p.111

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• Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Book, Thinking

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• forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums

  Zbigniew Herbert

  Fighting, Moon, Museums

  Zbigniew Herbert, John Carpenter, Bogdana Carpenter (1985). “Raport z oblezonego miasta i inne wiersze”, Ecco Pr

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• All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.

  Will Durant

  Plato, Home, Thinking

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• Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.

  D. J. Enright

  Hero, Subtle, Bigs

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• An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then - hoisting onto its back a new world-figure - feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.

  Randall Jarrell

  Mistake, Tired, Intelligent

  "A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables" by Randall Jarrell, (pp. 116-117), 1962.

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• I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

  Duke of Wellington

  Friends, Hate, Believe

  Noted in Lady Salisbury's diary, 26 October 1833, in C. Oman 'The Gascoyne Heiress' (1968) 3

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• There are two Italies.... The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other is the most degraded, disgusting, and odious. What do you think? Young women of rank actually eat - you will never guess what - garlick! Our poor friend Lord Byron is quite corrupted by living among these people, and in fact, is going on in a way not worthy of him.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Food, Men, Thinking

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• I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Depression, Exercise, Night

  Edgar Allan Poe (2006). “The Portable Edgar Allan Poe”, p.488, Penguin

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• When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt his like a thunder roll. . . . We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which serv'd for that Titanic life.

  Matthew Arnold

  Life, Eye, Taught Us

  Matthew Arnold (1994). “Dover Beach and Other Poems”, p.21, Courier Corporation

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• Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

  Matthew Arnold

  Time, Healing, Europe

  Matthew Arnold (1994). “Dover Beach and Other Poems”, p.22, Courier Corporation

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• Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease.

  Matthew Arnold

  Struggle, Sleep, Long

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.160, Delphi Classics

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• In very clear and available language, this book details how to recognize the inner critic and how to deal effectively with it. Byron Brown's presentation is useful for any individual who wishes to be free from the inner suffering and coercion of this ancient foe of our humanity, but it is specifically directed to those interested and engaged in the inner journey toward realization and enlightenment.

  A. H. Almaas

  Book, Journey, Humanity

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• I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Self, Epilepsy, Feet

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• Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!

  Aldous Huxley

  Book, Writing, Remarkable

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• Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.

  Anais Nin

  Venice, Together, Sound

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• Close thy Byron ; open thy Goethe .

  Thomas Carlyle

  Thomas Carlyle, Rodger L. Tarr, Mark Engel (2000). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books”, p.42, Univ of California Press

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