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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• When I was 16, I wanted to look like Lord Byron. It's not really a haircut so much as a hair-not-cut, but I've never changed it. It's a bit Byron, a bit Don Juan DeMarco and other things that I aspire to be.

  Jeremy Clarkson

  Cutting, Hair, Looks

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• In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.

  Gore Vidal

  Doors, House, Lust

  Gore Vidal (1969). “Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship. (1. Ed.)”, Boston : Little, Brown

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• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Boredom, Humanity, Quality

  1905 Heretics, ch.3.

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• A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Years, Names, Potency

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• I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Love, Jesus, School

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.36, Open Road Media

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• It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

  Jane Campion

  Mean, Journey, Poet

  "Jane Campion's Ode To Keats' Romantic Love". "All Things Considered" with Melissa Block, www.npr.org. September 18, 2009.

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• When Ruth Bader Ginsburg came in front of the Senate and was approved 96-3 to be on the Supreme Court to replace conservative justice Byron White. This is in 1993.Now, Justice Ginsburg, it was noted earlier, was a general counsel for the ACLU, certainly a liberal group. It was abundantly clear during the confirmation hearing that Ginsburg would swing the balance of the court to the left.But because President [Bill] Clinton won the election and because Justice Ginsburg clearly had the intellectual ability and integrity to serve on the court, she was confirmed.

  Sam Brownback

  Integrity, Swings, White

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Eve Byron has a permanent place on my must-buy list. Her characters are three-dimensional men and women who live on in readers' hearts long after they've turned the last page. ONLY IN MY DREAMS is pure Eve Byron, which means it's a pure delight. I fell in love with Lorelei and Dane, two of the most delightful characters I've encountered in a very long time. Byron's magical touch never falters. ONLY IN MY DREAMS is a surefire hit!

  Barbara Bretton

  Dream, Heart, Character

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• Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Real, Influence, Gloomy

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• In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

  Cyril Connolly

  Sex, Revenge, War

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• Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds?
  There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Beauty, Art, Eye

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• But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
  With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to
  people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.

  Ogden Nash

  Purple, People, Soldier

  Ogden Nash (1935). “The primrose path”

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• I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.

  Jason Silva

  Artist, Thinking, Play

  Source: alejandrotrojas.com

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