Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians (1917)

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The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Lytton Strachey
Her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains.

Lytton Strachey
The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.

Lytton Strachey
It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them... dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives.

Lytton Strachey
The time was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set it right.
Of Hurrell Froude

Lytton Strachey
Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.

Lytton Strachey