Quote

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Harold Bloom

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Harold Bloom
Age: 89 †
Born: 1930
Born: July 11
Died: 2019
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Professor
Writer
New York City
New York
Harold Irving Bloom
Book
Matters
Matter
Cry
Full
Reading
Read
Tell
Hears
Human
Finest
Humans
Critics

More quotes by Harold Bloom

Image
Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom
Image
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
Harold Bloom
Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
Image
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Harold Bloom
Image
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
Harold Bloom
Image
Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.
Harold Bloom
Image
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
Image
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
Harold Bloom
Image
I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.
Harold Bloom
Image
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Harold Bloom
Image
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
Image
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
Image
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
Harold Bloom
Image
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.
Harold Bloom
Image
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
Harold Bloom
Image
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom
Image
... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.
Harold Bloom
Image
Literature is achieved anxiety.
Harold Bloom
Image
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
Image
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold Bloom