The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Harold Bloom
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Real reading is a lonely activity.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.”
“All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.”
“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.”
“We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.”
“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?”
“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.”
“Originality must compound with inheritance.”
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Book Keywords:
discipleship-continuity, reading, identity, legacy, disillusionment, aesthetics, oscar-wilde, innovation, idealism, advocacy, thought-life, change, worship, self-discipline, writing, poetry, literature, anxiety, humanity, canon, evangelism, parenthood, creativity, grace-of-god, heritage
