A Quote by Thomas Carlyle

Biography is the only true history.

Thomas Carlyle

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Biography History Only True

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Thomas Carlyle
Scottish - Philosopher
December 4, 1795 - February 5, 1881

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

William Golding

When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."

Nicholas Meyer

There is no history; only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.

Archibald Geikie

There is properly no history, only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm convinced the true history of our time isn't what we read in newspapers or books...True history is almost invisible. It flows like an underground spring. It takes place in the shadows, and in silence, George. And only a chosen few know what that history is.

Félix J. Palma

The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.

Janet Malcolm

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

H. W. Brands

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

Rachel Holmes

The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.

Allen C. Guelzo

In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.

Henry David Thoreau

Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.

Russell Freedman

[Judge and Jury] is outstanding. I have learned more about the history of baseball, true history, than from anything I have ever read or heard about. [It's] research and documentation clarifies so many of the personalities and events that took place before 'my time' in the game. Jacques Barzun's quote: 'Whoever would know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball' should be supplanted by [this] biography of Landis.

Ralph Kiner

To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense,it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it.

Henry David Thoreau

What they teach you as history is mythology and true mythology is far from fantasy -- it is our true history. A bulk of our real history can be found in Egyptian and Greek mythology. Yes, myths reveal to us worlds of other dimensions that make up our true reality. History books teach us that the minds of the past operated on the same frequency, dimension, or level of consciousness as we do now. Not true at all.

Suzy Kassem

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Walter Jon Williams

A Quote by Thomas Carlyle

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