Biographies Quotes

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.

I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.

The creative person should have no other biography than his works.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

A photograph is a biography of a moment.

On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - you thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life.

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

I'm an avid biography reader.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Our theology must become biography.

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.

For no sooner had I begun to read this great work [Frasier, The Golden Bough ], than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography.Boswell was one ofthesmallest menthat ever lived and he has beaten them all.

I possess every good quality, but the one that distinguishes me above all is modesty.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.

What would become of all historical biography if it was written only with consideration for other peoples' feelings?

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

Your biography becomes your biology.

John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.

Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.

A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

All of our theology must eventually become biography.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.