Top 160 Harold Bloom Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

— Harold Bloom

2. “Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?”

— Harold Bloom

3. “Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.”

— Harold Bloom

4. “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”

— Harold Bloom

5. “The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.”

— Harold Bloom

6. “The central image for freedom in Lucretius is the clinamen or sudden “swerve.” As the atoms in the cosmos fall downward and outward they capriciously swerve, and this change in direction provides for our freedom of will. Last poems, as I read them, execute clinamens in regard to a previous poetic career. They assert a final freedom for the imagination.”

— Harold Bloom

7. “He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”

— Harold Bloom

8. “The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.”

— Harold Bloom

9. “There is no method except yourself.”

— Harold Bloom

10. “Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.”

— Harold Bloom

11. “If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.”

— Harold Bloom

12. “Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.”

— Harold Bloom

13. “There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.”

— Harold Bloom

14. “We’ll try this first. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. That’s life, isn’t it?”

— Harold Bloom

15. “Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.”

— Harold Bloom

16. “I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.”

— Harold Bloom

17. “One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.”

— Harold Bloom

18. “We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.”

— Harold Bloom

19. “Shakespeare is universal.”

— Harold Bloom

20. “No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen.”

— Harold Bloom

21. “Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.”

— Harold Bloom

22. “We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.”

— Harold Bloom

23. “There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.”

— Harold Bloom

24. “Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett’s canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett’s Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”

— Harold Bloom

25. “Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.”

— Harold Bloom

26. “Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.”

— Harold Bloom

27. “We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.”

— Harold Bloom

28. “Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

— Harold Bloom

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29. “You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.”

— Harold Bloom

30. “No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.”

— Harold Bloom

31. “Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.”

— Harold Bloom

32. “Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.”

— Harold Bloom

33. “In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.”

— Harold Bloom

34. “How to read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”

— Harold Bloom

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35. “Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.”

— Harold Bloom

36. “I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.”

— Harold Bloom

37. “I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.”

— Harold Bloom

38. “Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.”

— Harold Bloom

39. “What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.”

— Harold Bloom

40. “Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.”

— Harold Bloom

41. “We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”

— Harold Bloom

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42. “According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire.”

— Harold Bloom

43. “Literature is achieved anxiety.”

— Harold Bloom

44. “In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.”

— Harold Bloom

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45. “People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I.”

— Harold Bloom

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46. “The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.”

— Harold Bloom

47. “Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.”

— Harold Bloom

48. “You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.”

— Harold Bloom

49. “Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, “tuned the English tongue.”

— Harold Bloom

50. “Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.”

— Harold Bloom