Quote

Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.

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
Western
Kafka
Jesus
Enigma
Hamlet
Socrates
Amalgam
Riddle
Enigmas
Repetition
Kierkegaard
Irony
Ironies
Wake
Riddles

More quotes by Harold Bloom

Image
Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.
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
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
Harold Bloom
Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
Image
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Harold Bloom
Image
Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
Harold Bloom
Image
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
Image
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
Harold Bloom
Image
There is no method except yourself.
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
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
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
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold Bloom
Image
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
Image
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
Harold Bloom
Image
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
Image
Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom
Image
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
Harold Bloom