George Saintsbury Quotes

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.

Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy.

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.

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.

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.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

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.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

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)

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.

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.

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.

The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.

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.