24+ George Saintsbury Quotes On Education, Government And Literary Criticism/history

George Saintsbury was a British writer, literary historian, scholar, critic and wine connoisseur. He was a prolific author, writing on topics ranging from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to the history of wine. His most famous work is the multi-volume History of English Prose Rhythm (1912–1924). Following is our collection on famous quotes by George Saintsbury on education, life, leadership.

Top 10 George Saintsbury Quotes

1. 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.
2. Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy.
3. Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
4. 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.
5. 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)
6. When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
7. I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.
8. 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.
9. But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.
10. Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

George Saintsbury Short Quotes

• The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.
• Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.
• So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.
• Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.
• The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.

George Saintsbury Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by George Saintsbury

George Saintsbury's work is a reminder of the importance of taking the time to appreciate the beauty of the written word. He also emphasizes the need for careful research and fact-checking when writing, as well as the value of writing with passion and enthusiasm. Finally, his work emphasizes the importance of writing with clarity and precision, so that the reader can easily understand the message.