Top 160 Harold Bloom Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen’s work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.”

— Harold Bloom

52. “Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don’t see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.”

— Harold Bloom

53. “All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.”

— Harold Bloom

54. “No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.”

— Harold Bloom

55. “But Hamlet is death’s ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.”

— Harold Bloom

56. “Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.”

— Harold Bloom

57. “Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.”

— Harold Bloom

58. “I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.”

— Harold Bloom

59. “Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.”

— Harold Bloom

60. “Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.”

— Harold Bloom

61. “Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.”

— Harold Bloom

62. “It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.”

— Harold Bloom

63. “What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther’s outburst “Death to the Law!” which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became “Death to the Jews!” The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple.”

— Harold Bloom

64. “Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.”

— Harold Bloom

65. “Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.”

— Harold Bloom

66. “Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield.”

— Harold Bloom

67. “We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

— Harold Bloom

68. “The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.”

— Harold Bloom

69. “You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.”

— Harold Bloom

70. “Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.”

— Harold Bloom

71. “To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.”

— Harold Bloom

72. “Criticism in the universities, I’ll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It’s Stalinism without Stalin.”

— Harold Bloom

73. “Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.”

— Harold Bloom

74. “I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike.”

— Harold Bloom

75. “The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.”

— Harold Bloom

76. “The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.”

— Harold Bloom

77. “The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.”

— Harold Bloom

78. “Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious.”

— Harold Bloom

79. “Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.”

— Harold Bloom

80. “There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she’d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.”

— Harold Bloom

81. “No, no I’m not an atheist. it’s no fun being an atheist .”

— Harold Bloom

82. “To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory “pipe dreams” is right also.”

— Harold Bloom

83. “I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.”

— Harold Bloom

84. “I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.”

— Harold Bloom

85. “Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.”

— Harold Bloom

86. “But I can’t understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia .”

— Harold Bloom

87. “Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.”

— Harold Bloom

88. “One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.”

— Harold Bloom

89. “Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.”

— Harold Bloom

90. “The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation.”

— Harold Bloom

91. “Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.”

— Harold Bloom

92. “The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.”

— Harold Bloom

93. “I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Tolstoy’s novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity.”

— Harold Bloom

94. “More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.”

— Harold Bloom

95. “All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, “condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.”

— Harold Bloom

96. “What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.”

— Harold Bloom

97. “Real reading is a lonely activity.”

— Harold Bloom

98. “Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.”

— Harold Bloom

99. “At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.”

— Harold Bloom

100. “All canonical writing possesses the quality “of making you feel strangeness at home.”

— Harold Bloom