The Western Canon Quotes

“Real reading is a lonely activity.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Originality must compound with inheritance.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.”
― Harold Bloom , The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“We are great fools. “He has spent his life in idleness,” we say; “I have done nothing today.” What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. . . . To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.   W”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. . . . The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice?”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called “aesthetic dignity.” One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“When the School of Resentment becomes as dominant among art historians and critics as it is among literary academics, will Matisse go unattended while we all flock to view the daubings of the Guerrilla Girls? The lunacy of these questions is plain enough when it comes to the eminence of Matisse, while Stravinsky is clearly in no danger of being replaced by politically correct music for the ballet companies of the world. Why then is literature so vulnerable to the onrush of our contemporary social idealists?”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“The tragic sense of life in Don Quixote is also the faith of Moby Dick. Ahab is a monomaniac; so is the kindlier Quixote, but both are tormented idealists who seek justice in human terms, not as theocentric men but as ungodly, godlike men.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“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, Books of the Western Canon: 797 Great Books by 204 Essential Authors

“If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called “aesthetic dignity.” One”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages